Liang Zhiping, "Tianxia and Ideology"

Liang Zhiping, “Imagining ‘Tianxia’:  Building Ideology in Contemporary China”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction

Liang Zhiping 梁治平 (b. 1959), is a well-known legal scholar at the Center for Research in Chinese Culture, part of the Chinese National Academy of Arts in Beijing.  His principle research focus is on comparative law, understood in the broadest possible terms, and over the course of a long and prolific career, he has published on an impressively wide variety of topics.[2]  Like many scholars of his generation, Liang wrote from a liberal perspective early in his career, generally imagining that some version of the Western rule of law would establish itself in China as the reforms of the post-Mao era took effect.  Yet as China’s rise eroded the liberal consensus among many Chinese intellectuals, Liang, already sensitive to the cultural aspects of law, broadened his research to embrace facets of the Chinese legal tradition of which he had originally been more critical.

In the long text translated here, Liang’s subject is the recent enthusiasm, among Chinese statesmen and scholars, for the traditional concept of tianxia 天下.  Tianxia, often translated as “all-under-heaven,” in fact refers to China’s notion of universalism prior to the arrival of the modern West.  The idea has a geographical component, imagining a world of concentric circles with China at the center, but the force of the idea is above all moral:  Chinese universalism was supposedly open and welcoming to all who wished to bathe in the warmth of its embrace, and the “borders” of tianxia were hence porous, the exchanges between different peoples as fluid and easy as the dance of yin and yang in the taijitu. 

I confess that I have no idea if such an order ever really existed. Tianxia purists identify it with the pre-Confucian rise of Chinese civilization, meaning that even under the dynasties tianxia practices were but faint echoes of the glories that had once been, and that China peaked very early, but tianxia is about myths rather than history, the future rather than the past. 

The recent enthusiasm for tianxia in China has accompanied the excitement engendered by China’s rise, and for the same reasons.  China’s rise—and the West’s concurrent stumbles (financial crisis, Trump, Brexit, refugees)—has inspired the idea that the twenty-first century will be China’s, and that with the failure of both Soviet communism and American neoliberalism, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics will become the model for the world political economy.  Tianxia (along with One Belt-One Road) is the international tangent of this dream, the hope that the Westphalian system and the American empire will recede before the force of a better idea, putting an end to the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” of the competitive nation-state order and ushering in a new reign of universal harmony. 

While tianxia (perhaps like Esperanto?) can be interesting as a thought-exercise in imagining alternative realities, I have a hard time envisioning the role it might play in the rough and tumble of international trade and conflict.  But that is not the point, as Liang Zhiping skillfully points out.  The point is that tianxia is a key concept in the ideological reconstruction underway in China, a candidate to become part of China’s new (yet ancient) founding myths, in turn a crucial element in China’s rediscovery of self and reinvention of agency after her near fatal confrontation with the modern West.

Although long and a bit repetitive (perhaps because of the length—readers, and even writers, forget), Liang’s essay is quite the tour de force.  I had expected a brutal critique of tianxia puffery (on the order of Ge Zhaoguang’s delicious takedown of China’s New Confucians—in fact, Ge has written just such a criticism of the tianxia theorists, which Liang discusses at length in his essay), but Liang is in fact much more measured, given that his subject is the role of tianxia discourse in the construction of a new Chinese ideology, and not the “quality” of tianxia ideas as such. 

He makes his own preferences clear, if only by the amount of space he gives over to Xu Jilin (“The New Tianxia:  Rebuilding China’s Internal and External Orders”) who argues, in essence, that tianxia ideals may be wonderful in the abstract, but that contemporary China does not practice them at all, neither in her relations with minority groups like the Uyghurs or Tibetans, nor with her neighbors in East Asia and elsewhere.  Liang similarly directs one of his few overtly critical comments at Jiang Shigong’s overly creative efforts (“Philosophy and History”) to marry Xi Jinping thought to traditional Chinese civilization.  Liang’s goal, however, is to illustrate the variety and ambition of tianxia theory, and not its shortcomings.  He has important things to say about the role of plausibility and the power of persuasion in the work of ideological construction, but his wide-ranging exploration of tianxia theories is meant to show just how pervasive the concept has become in many realms of thought in contemporary China.

The core of Liang’s essay is, appropriately, a review of the “greatest hits” in tianxia theory.  He begins, as he should, with Zhao Tingyang and his The Tianxia System, which started the ball rolling with its publication in 2005.  He subsequently discusses the ideas of:  the New Confucians Jiang Qing, Sheng Hong, and Yao Zhongqiu, the philosopher Chen Yun, the New Left star Wang Hui, the China-model cheerleader, Zhang Weiwei, the Western defender of the China model, Daniel A. Bell, the New Left statist Jiang Shigong, and the historian Gan Yang and his “unifying the three traditions,” among others. 

Liang also presents the views of prominent tianxia critics:  the historians Ge Zhaoguang and Xu Jilin, the novelist Chan Koonchung (who criticizes particularly Jiang Shigong’s work on “one country-two systems” in Hong Kong; Chan’s remarks seem prescient in the present context), as well as South Korean and Japanese scholars worried about the regional implications of the return of tianxia, and Salvadore Babones, the American sociologist who argues that tianxia still belongs to the United States.  Other thinkers, neither tianxia theorists nor critics, but whose work nonetheless explores many of the same issues, include:  the Hegelian theorist Shi Jian, the liberal public intellectual Wu Jiaxiang, and the anthropologist Wang Mingming. 

Throughout, Liang’s goal is neither to provide a comprehensive reading of the tianxia theory of a particular writer, nor to probe specific differences in various tianxia approaches, but instead to suggest to the reader the breadth of the effort to revisit Chinese history and reinvent Chinese agency through explorations of the notion of tianxia, an effort with which Liang is clearly sympathetic.

A further strength of Liang’s essay is his discussion of the role of Xi Jinping and the CCP in incorporating Chinese civilization into a new ideology, a strength made possible by the fact that Liang’s essay is published in Taiwan.[3]  Liang is not particularly critical on this front (although Xi Jinping sounds a lot like Zhang Weiwei…), but he writes with more freedom than he could in mainland China, and discusses frankly what the Party has done and why.  Liang’s final plea, directed both at China’s leadership and at Liang’s fellow intellectuals, is that these intellectuals be allowed to participate freely in the process of ideology-building, because ideas imposed solely by the power of the state have little credibility.  Readers will decide for themselves whether this plea to “let us serve” is a reassertion of the relevance of the Chinese literati or a sad commentary on the state of China’s thought world under Xi Jinping.

A word on translation.  I translated the entirety of Liang’s text, but was more selective in my translation of his extensive footnotes.  Here, I allowed myself to paraphrase or even omit notes that struck me as interesting only to the specialist (who can read the Chinese text in any event), while at the same time sharing with the reader the wealth of sources Liang consulted.        

Liang’s text is very long, 39,000 words, 133 pages double-spaced.  Click here for a pdf version with footnotes at the bottom of the page. 

Translation

Part One

In addition to the main site in Beijing, the 2018 New Year’s Eve CCTV Gala had four secondary sites, one of which was in Taian 泰安 in Shandong.  The Taian gala was presented on a stage at the base of the Heavenly Candle Peak 天烛峰, to the east of the mountain where the “investiture of the gods ceremony 封神大典” was held.[4]  For a few days, the media was full of comments on the historical meaning of the investiture of the gods and writings about the event.  As a result, ordinary people learned that the investiture of the gods at Taishan 泰山 symbolized peace and prosperity at home and abroad, because “heaven had chosen a ruler who brought order to the people and peace to heaven, compensating the various spirits for their merit”.[5] 

Of course, that the thirty-five year-old CCTV New Year’s Eve gala chose Taishan as one of their settings, and broadcast the scene in China and abroad, and in multiple languages, was not merely a question of entertainment.  In February, three days after the broadcast of the gala, CCTV posted on its website a one minute, thirty-five second clip entitled “Family-State and Tianxia,” helping viewers to understand, “through General Secretary Xi Jinping’s deep feelings for the family-state,” his “historical mission and deep responsibility toward their families and the nation.”[6] 

These programs and video clips, diffused via television and the Internet, reached hundreds of millions of viewers.  Those familiar with recent history were surely quite impressed with the spectacle, because the concepts and symbols appearing in these scenes, such as family-state 家国, tianxia 天下, investiture 封禅, proclamation 教告, heavenly mandate 天命, great peace 太平, etc., were all key words in the ideology that occupied a position of dominance throughout Chinese history.  This ideology—and the tradition that it represents—became in modern times the object of doubt, criticism and destruction during various revolutions, leading to its eventual decline and fall.  Consequently, it is extremely meaningful that these ideas are once again considered important today. Clearly, behind this phenomenon lie many social changes and intellectual struggles, connected to hopes and dreams that stir the people’s souls. 

Consequently, we want to understand:  Where did these changes come from?  What do they mean?  Where are they leading us?  This text will focus on tianxia, a key word that was extremely important in ancient times before falling into obscurity, only to be revived again as part of China’s “prosperous age.”  We will examine the modern fate of this concept, and especially its revival in the past few decades.  We will examine its vicissitudes and explore its context so as to understand its trajectory and the reason for its return.

Part Two

​In the past, tianxia was part of a moral civilizational order with universal meaning.  Within this moral civilizational order, heaven gave birth to the people, the emperor received the mandate of heaven, respect for virtue sustained the people, and moral teachings were propagated near and far, both within China and outside the central kingdom.  Understood in this sense, the idea of tianxia could be narrow or broad, and could expand or contract, changing with historical conditions, and thus served as a norm for the family-state and a comfort to the popular mind. 

When in olden days people talked about tianxia, the notion was at once a description, a symbol, an ideal, and a norm, thus in the traditional intellectual world, tianxia was both a conceptual construct people used to understand and imagine the world, as well as a criterion by which to affirm or criticize the existing order, hence its importance.  Yet this same concept, which had once been so important, came to be violently denounced in the course of China’s modern experience as a main reason for China’s weakness.  Critics argued that the concept of tianxia had nourished notions of “the difference between Chinese and barbarians” as well as ideas of Sino-centrism, both of which left China closed in on itself, uninterested in the larger world, eventually leading to humiliation at the hands of foreigners. 

In addition, the critique continued, Chinese people had historically identified only with the family, and not the country, only with tianxia, and not the nation.  Dynasties came and went without consequence, and it mattered little to be ruled by peoples of a different ethnicity.  The tianxia ideology was thus not compatible with modern nationalism or statism, the force and rationale of which are obvious.  Hence if China wanted to pursue strength, she had to abandon familialism 家族主义 and tianxia ideas, and adopt nationalism and statism. 

With the support of such arguments, the idea of tianxia was gradually replaced by concepts like “international 万国,” state, and world.  This was especially true after 1900, when China’s power went into freefall and the appeal of nationalism became ever stronger.  Measures to build a nation-state accelerated, and the tianxia concept came to seem irrelevant, and finally more or less disappeared.  Nonetheless, as a leading concept that had long guided the people’s hearts throughout Chinese history, the spirit of tianxia, despite its apparent eclipse, continued to exist beneath the surface, expressed in the thought and behavior of the Chinese people.  Even during revolutionary periods, when all concepts associated with tradition were thoroughly denounced, traces of its influence remained.  This suggests that if we hope to understand the changes in modern Chinese politics, society, thought and culture, we must look past popular discourse and seek out the vestiges of traditional thought.  The points discussed below suggest the outlines of the ongoing influence of tianxia.

Tianxia describes an effective universal moral order, unbounded by geography or ethnicity.  Traditional ideas concerning distinctions between Chinese and barbarians were grounded in notions of culture and education, and nothing else.  But after the Song dynasty, and particularly following the Yuan-Ming and Ming-Qing dynastic transitions, the idea of distinctions between Chinese and barbarians that were based on ethnicity and geography gradually took form, and evolved to become the Han-centered nationalism of the late Qing period. 

Thereafter, there were two competing strains of nationalism in the late Qing, one centered on race and one centered on culture.  This difference was expressed in different projects of national construction, the first a Han-nationalism involving chiefly the 18 provinces of “China proper,” and the second an amalgam of Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Hui Muslim, Tibetan, Miao, and other ethnicities in a Chinese nation that inherited the borders of the Qing state.  The Five-People Republic eventually founded in 1912 chose the second kind of nationalism, and this Chinese Republic became the basis for the modern Chinese state.  What we should stress is that the achievement of this kind of “imagined community” as the structure for a modern state not only, from the very outset, inherited the cultural vision inherent in the traditional notion of tianxia, but also inherited the Qing dynasty’s physical expression of tianxia, and can be seen as the absorption of the traditional idea of tianxia by the modern Chinese state. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, as China suffered ever more from the pressure and attacks of Western powers and Japan, Chinese academics became all the more concerned about historical borders and racial questions, and adopted research strategies based on modern academic disciplines such as history, archaeology, linguistics, anthropology, and ethnography to provide lasting proof of the unity of the Chinese nation.  These efforts have been labelled, by some scholars, as an attempt to bring the “four barbarians” into China.[7]  In fact, such efforts have continued to the present day, as we see in projects like the New Qing History or in certain types of historical philosophy that seek to bridge the gap between ancient and modern times. 

Still, what we must not forget as we examine this period in history is that, even if the dominant concepts are not the same, the work of “imagining a community” and integrating many races into a single group had begun, and had achieved results, several hundred years prior to the founding of the Chinese Republic.  The early Qing emperors emphasized theories of the cultural differences between Chinese and barbarians as an argument to legitimize their rule, and New Text advocates among Qing Confucians, and especially those Gongyang scholars who based themselves on the Spring and Autumn Annals, held forth the notion of “great unity 大一统” in an effort to build a political community organized around ritual rather than on geography or race.[8] 

For this reason, it is hardly surprising that the discipline of geography, which grew out of Qing concern with the history of boundaries, also developed against the background of New Text classical scholarship.[9]  Such developments and changes not only provided important intellectual and cultural resources to the imagination of the later Republic, but also directly built the material basis of the modern Chinese state.

Another special feature of the tianxia concept is its transnational nature, which is expressed in at least two ways.  First, the tianxia concept is linked together with a universal civilizational order and with the ideal of the kingly way.  The moral character of this tianxia allows it to transcend, on the level of values, political communities like those of nations.  In addition, because tianxia is constructed on a civilizational basis, its scope is flexible, capable of expanding and contracting without concern for boundaries.  For this reason, tianxia does not accord the same importance to issues of territory and boundaries, so prized by modern nations.  Of course, this is the reason for the progressive shrinking of the tianxia concept from late Qing times forward, and its replacement by nationalism today. 

Yet the rejection by the modern Chinese intellectual and political elite of tianxia-ism is not as complete as it might first appear.  Even if in terms of politics and culture, this elite clearly prefers the nation to tianxia, in their heart of hearts, the old ideas of tianxia and kingly rule have not completely disappeared, and continue to exist not only intellectually, in a latent form, but to have considerable appeal as spiritual values.  After all, the tianxia concept is part of their cultural identity, and linked to historical memory. The transcendent moral ideal of tianxia also includes not only the cultural ideology that the strong must protect the “four barbarians,” but also the idea that the weak can resist the power of the strong and nourish the spirit of forbearance of their own people. 

In the early Republican period, Chinese intellectuals embraced mutualism, and particularly universalism 世界主义, believing that the victory of the allies during the First World War was a “victory of truth over power,” a “victory of unity over racial prejudice.”  What this optimism expressed was an unconscious embrace of tianxia and unity, rather than a cold-blooded analysis of actual events.  While the confidence that truth would defeat power did not survive the Paris Versailles Conference, and while Chinese enthusiasm for internationalism repeatedly gave way to nationalism, this nationalism remained mixed with internationalism, or perhaps internationalism continued to be the highest goal of nationalism. 

For example, even as Sun Yat-sen proclaimed the superiority of nationalism to internationalism, he argued that nationalism should be the basis or prerequisite for internationalism.  In his words:  “If in the future we wish to rule our country and bring peace to the world, we must first restore nationalism and the position of national peoples, and on the basis of existing peace and morality, unify the world under one rule.  This is the mission of four hundred million people…This is our true nationalist spirit.”[10]  Here, the tensions between nationalism and internationalism are transformed into a progressive force pushing history forward, and this latent possibility can be understood as being firmly rooted in China’s existing cultural spirit.  This is clearly not by accident.

This complex relationship between nationalism and internationalism is also revealed in the practice of the Chinese Communist Party.  Building the nation and creating the state have surely been the central topics of China’s twentieth-century revolutions, but against the backdrop of the communist revolution, the subject developed in a particular way.  Broadly speaking, since communism is a form of internationalism, its focal point is not separate communities of nations or states, but rather mankind as a whole.  From a communist perspective, national self-determination or independence is not without value as a goal, but this value is transitional, instrumental.  The ultimate goal is to bring together workers of the entire world and to liberate all of mankind.  Ultimately, communism—like tianxia—aims for a world utopia, and this worldwide peace and harmony is humanity’s ultimate destiny. 

For Chinese intellectuals, this concept accords with their traditional understanding, and the ideal contained within the project is also attractive.  Of course, at first glance, communist discourse and traditional Chinese thought seem completely different, but this surface difference should not obscure certain internal structural similarities.  In fact, in the process of the sinicization of Marxism, these intellectual resources of different origins complemented one another, producing a completely harmonious blend.  In the winter of 1935, the Communist leader Mao Zedong, who was leading the Central Red Army 中央红军 on the final leg of the Long March, climbed the peak of Minshan 岷山 where he looked over the Kunlun mountain range, and penned his bold poem “Kunlun” in which he heroically stated his wish: 

“Could I but draw my sword o'ertopping heaven
I'd cleave you in three:
One piece for Europe,
One for America,
One to keep in the East.
Peace would then reign over the world,
The same warmth and cold throughout the globe.”[11] 

This vivid poem makes one think of the “great harmony” proclaimed in the Book of Rites or the ancient emperors who reigned over tianxia.  Yet after the success of the revolution, once tianxia was again whole, the words of the poet became the will of a leader, used to divide inner and outer, policies that fixed national borders.  Historians have pointed out that the leading ideas and principles guiding the PRC’s relations with is neighbors, especially on the questions of borders, reflect more a combination of the Chinese historical concept of dynasty and the communist ideal of the world proletarian revolution, and less principles related to modern national sovereignty.  This suggests that, in the broad context of the international communist movement, the logic of China’s behavior when dealing with neighboring countries and with “brother countries from the socialist camp” can only be understood with reference to the traditional notion of tianxia.

The American historian Joseph Levenson (1920-1969) once said:  “Most of the intellectual history of modern China is a process of transforming ‘tianxia’ into a ‘country.’”  This is a useful generalization, but what it reveals is only the most obvious part of this process of intellectual change.  The things I have been discussing above are the more obscure parts of that process.  The obvious parts represent the strength of the newest and the most revolutionary aspects of this history, while the obscure parts represent more that which is old, conservative, changeless. 

​Ultimately, the two worked together, defining the basic intellectual characteristics of an age, as well as the logic guiding the behavior of those influenced by these intellectual characteristics.  This is true even if people—especially people caught up in the moment—often fail to understand these hidden aspects, or perhaps are completely unaware of them.  In modern Chinese history, new thought, new ideas, new discourse created the revolution, in the process trampling on everything that was old and disintegrating.  The old ideas, thought, and discourse lost their legitimacy, and completely withdrew from the discursive system of society as a whole, although their influence remained, hidden and invisible. 

Yet beginning in the 1980s, and especially as we have entered the twenty-first century, in the wake of great changes in China’s economic and social life, obvious changes occurred as well in the fields of thought and culture.  In the course of this process, the ruling party changed its stance of extreme opposition to tradition, and developed a more approving attitude toward traditional culture, all of which brought about an enormous change in the situation under discussion here.  Overnight, “national learning 国学”[12] became a hot topic, traditional classics were once again respected, and the modern significance of traditional political wisdom came to be widely acknowledged. 

Against this backdrop, the idea of tianxia came out of the shadows and emerged as the object of excited discussion.  Many points of view were developed, in which tianxia was defined in accordance with the views of particular authors, some hoping to expand it, others to transform it, using it to remake history or to interpret contemporary reality, to imagine the future, competing to invest this ancient concept with contemporary significance.

Part Three

Among all the contemporary discussions of tianxia, Zhao Tingyang’s 赵汀阳 (b. 1961) philosophical narrative of his “tianxia system” is probably the one that has attracted the most attention.  In 2005, Zhao combined two texts that he had already written with a newly penned introduction entitled “Why We Should Discuss China’s World View” and published them together in a book called The Tianxia System:  A Philosophical Introduction to the World System 天下体系：世界制度哲学导论 (referred to hereafter as The Tianxia System).[13]  The book attracted a great deal of attention from within the academic world as soon as it was published.  In 2011, Zhao republished the book, this time including fifteen essays from China and abroad commenting on or criticizing the volume.  Five years later, he published another book called The Contemporary Relevance of Tianxia:  The Practice and Imagination of the World Order 天下的当代性： 世界秩序的实践与想象, which supplemented the narrative of the first book.

Before undertaking a brief exploration of Zhao’s Tianxia System, we must first note two intellectual contexts behind his rethinking of the tianxia concept.  The most important of these contexts, to use Zhao’s own words, was the “rethinking China 重思中国” movement, and the second was his observation that in a context of globalization, “the world remains a non-world 世界仍然是一个非世界.”

What was the “rethinking China” movement?  Zhao Tingyang argues that China’s economic success since the 1980s resulted in immense changes in the relationship between China and the world, and consequently, the importance of Chinese culture and thought to the world also became more apparent.  Since China now found itself at the center of the world’s stage, she needed to reflect on world issues, assume her responsibilities to the world, and produce her own intellectual vision of the world. 

However, people quickly discovered that China was not adequately prepared in terms of knowledge and thought.  Even if thousands of pages have been written about China over the past century, most of these can be grouped under the heading of “interrogating China 检讨中国.”  Most took direct aim at various problems in China’s history, culture and society, and attacked them without pity.  Although such criticism was not groundless, it did little to suggest where China’s hope might lie, to say nothing of what China might contribute to the rest of the world. 

Even more problematic was that this purely negative criticism “pulled the rug out from under the people by attacking their confidence in the Chinese nation, society, and culture,” and hence contributed to “society’s collective decadence, corruption, and moral decline,” all of which constituted a “collective lack of responsibility toward the nation, toward society, and toward the culture.”  In contrast to this, “rethinking China” was an intellectual movement that sought to reflect on China in a positive fashion, the historical significance of which was to “attempt to restore China’s own intellectual capacity, to allow China to begin to think again, building her own intellectual framework and basic concepts, her own worldview, value system and methodology, to reconsider China’s relationship to the world, which meant rethinking China’s future as well as her role in and responsibility to the world.”  When Zhao Tingyang reconstructed China’s worldview from within the world of classical Chinese thought, it was a response to the needs of this movement.

But why tianxia?  In Zhao’s view, “rethinking China” is “both a basic intellectual issue and a macro-strategic question.”  This meant that the “China question is first and foremost a philosophical question as well as a political science question.”  Clearly, in the context of classical Chinese thought, the tianxia concept is the one that best responds to current needs.  And it is equally important that tianxia is the world.  If we say that “the basic aim of rethinking China is to rethink the world,” which means that “thought about China will develop to become thought about the world,” then beginning with the idea of tianxia is an ideal choice.  According to Zhao Tingfang’s observation, ancient China’s view of tianxia, at least in terms of its theoretical significance, could provide a sorely needed integral view of the world. 

So what is the state of today’s world?  In Zhao’s terms, “the world remains a non-world,” by which he means that although globalization has already linked the world together, the present integration is merely at a geographical level, and has little political meaning.  People feel no sense of belonging to the world as they do to a country.  As a result, “the world does not belong to any one country, nor does it belong to the world, or even less to the people; it is merely a survival space, the object of competition and loss.” 

It is true that while international organizations and structures do exist in today’s world, in Zhao’s eyes these do not constitute a genuine world system, but are mere appendages developed in the course of exchanges between nation-states.  The dominant concept in international relations is not internationalism, but has always been nationalism and statism, which has allowed the world to descend into chaos, and has transformed globalization into global divisions 全球分化.  Today, it has proven “impossible to develop a universal concept of the world’s people, or a common world society.”  This is the context that prompted Zhao Tingyang to revive the classical Chinese concept of tianxia as a way forward.

In Zhao Tingyang’s view, China’s traditional tianxia idea has at least three levels of meaning—geographical, psychological, and theoretical/political.  Among these, the theoretical/political “leads to a one-world utopia,” whose “chief significance resides in imagining and striving after a kind of ‘world order,’ and a ‘world government’ guaranteed by this world order.”  This kind of tianxia outlook reveals a true universalist perspective and a boundless reach, captured in the phrase “there is nothing outside of tianxia.” 

The principle that ‘there is nothing outside of tianxia’ transcendentally defines the world as an integrated political concept, which means that the tianxia system has an internal dimension but no external dimension, which in turn means that ideas of foreigner or enemy disappear:  no one is seen as the outsider who cannot be absorbed, no country, people, or culture is perceived as an enemy who cannot be transformed, and any country or region that has not yet entered the tianxia system will be invited into the common tianxia order. The integrative and open character of tianxia, at least on the theoretical level, “dispenses with the models of extremism and nationalism that divide the world,” which means that world affairs can be treated and processed at a world level. 

Equally important, tianxia is a base-level category, and has priority over communities like nations or peoples, “it is the final measuring stick for thinking about all kinds of issues.”  This guarantees that world values and interests that transcend nations or peoples can finally receive proper respect and attention.  In addition, in Zhao Tingyang’s telling of the story, the idea of tianxia also has a cultural significance, abiding in ritual, human-heartedness, and familial principles.  “Family nature is defined as that which can fully express human nature,” and thus comes to serve as the “universal principle that can handle all social, national, and tianxia questions.”  The principle that “those who practice ritual seek to perfect themselves and not to constrain others 礼不往教” suggests that the idea is not to trumpet one’s excellence to others, but rather functions as a sort of “other principle” different from subjectivity.  Understood and imagined in this fashion, tianxia “is the world order best able to diminish cultural conflict, and a cultural order that will define a world political order based in harmony.”

In sum, although China’s tianxia concept was conceived three thousand years ago, in terms of epistemology, methodology, values, and worldview—in fact from practically any vantage point—it seems to have been tailor-made to resolve the crises faced by mankind in today’s world.  Zhao Tingyang concludes by insisting that today’s political philosophy must evolve and that it “needs to create a new worldview and a new framework of political analysis, to be able to take up the goal of understanding the world in the world’s own terms, and, at the same time, to explain the world’s problems from the world’s perspective. 

This political principle is precisely the basic principle emphasized by China’s tianxia theory, in other words, that tianxia is the tianxia of the people of tianxia, and that the choices of tianxia must be the human choices of all of those who belong to tianxia.  It cannot be a kind of ideology, religion or culture, or the choice of any one country or people; no single country, people, or culture can take the place of tianxia.  In other words, the world must be defined by all of the people of the world, and not by some of the people.”  Zhao concludes, “Chinese political philosophy, with tianxia as its philosophical heart, is certainly the deepest theoretical underpinning for the world system.”

Compared to other contemporary works hoping to revive the tianxia idea, The Tianxia System was a marked success.  In fact, the breadth of its vision, its accessibility in terms of length, its clarity of expression and sharp use of language, and its forceful arguments all gave it significant intellectual heft.  However, while the author claimed to view the world from the standpoint of the world and to take “no viewpoint” as his viewpoint, the starting point for his theoretical construct was nonetheless grounded in classical Chinese epistemology, values, and worldviews, and his argument developed through a series of binary antagonisms such as ancient versus modern, China versus the West, and ideal versus real.  This gave his philosophical, conceptual, and ideal arguments about the future a heavy flavor of contemporary politics and institutions.  This is perhaps the major reason why his volume has stimulated scholars from many disciplines, and has sustained its influence. 

Nonetheless, as someone from outside the field pointed out, The Tianxia System was a best-seller “because it capitalized on a wave of interest in solving the world’s problems through Chinese solutions, and most particularly an interest in using the traditional tianxia idea to arrive at a synthesis of the seemingly contradictory notions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism.”[14]  In fact, many critics noted this “wave of interest” expressed in such realms as ideas, academics, art, and popular culture, and understood The Tianxia System’s publication and repercussions against a broader backdrop of macro-changes in society and culture. 

I share this interest and this perspective.  Hence my concerns are not to access the inner logic of any particular tianxia argument, or its capacity to define the issues, but rather to look at similarities and differences between many tianxia arguments, as well as to understand the historical factors that made these arguments central issues.  To do this, we first need to examine the development of other tianxia arguments.

As an old concept that was once dominant and subsequently rejected, the return of tianxia to mainstream discourse has relied on the revival of traditional culture, and especially the Confucian revival.  Thus it is altogether natural to find arguments linking tianxia to the Confucian revival.  In fact, at an even more basic level of meaning, it was contemporary Mainland New Confucians who first brought up the topic, beginning with Jiang Qing’s 蒋庆 (b. 1953) Introduction to Gongyang Studies 公羊学引论, published in 1995.

Introduction to Gongyang Studies was originally published as part of a larger collection of “national learning 国学丛书,” but it is not like run-of-the-mill books in national learning, because Jiang’s work is not really a study of the Gongyang tradition, but instead an effort to create a contemporary version of that tradition.  In other words, as an author, Jiang Qing is not recognized by contemporary scholarly disciplines like philosophy or history, but is rather a contemporary inheritor of the Gongyang tradition. 

His view of the Gongyang tradition is not that of the objective outsider studying a particular subject, but instead that of a true believer.  And what is different about Jiang from traditional proponents of the Gongyang tradition is that this tradition was completely destroyed by the challenges of Western knowledge to classical Chinese knowledge over the course of the last century’s transition between the traditional and modern worlds.  This meant that Confucian agency almost completely disappeared, sustaining itself as best it could in the private realm.  As a result, Jiang’s emphasis is on Confucianism’s political, institutional, and practical nature, and he hopes to develop the legislative and institution-building functions of traditional Confucianism.  This is what is known as political Confucianism. 

At the same time as Jiang has worked to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Confucianism’s political tradition, he has also developed the two major focal points of contemporary Mainland Confucians.  The first was a new understanding of Kang Youwei 康有为 (1858-1927), the late-Qing figure representing the Gongyang tradition, and the second was a renewed emphasis on the ideal of the “Kingly Way 王道” and the practice of the “outer king 外王” in Confucianism.[15]  Both of these points are related to the traditional tianxia concept, and both hence contributed to the development of contemporary tianxia arguments.

Five years after the publication of Introduction to Gongyang Studies, Jiang Qing published Political Confucianism 政治儒学.  This latter volume “employs the basic spirit and political wisdom of the New Texts to broadly comment on pressing academic, cultural, and political problems facing today’s China,” and is in fact a contemporary application of the Confucian ideas developed in Jiang’s earlier work.  What is interesting is that this book was originally intended to be published as part of a collection of writings on tianxia, while its central message was to “resolve difficult questions concerning the ‘clash of civilizations’ through the discussion of cultural issues.”  In the preface to Political Confucianism, Jiang writes:

"The basic theory on which this book relies came originally from the Spring and Autumn Annals, in which Confucius described his Way of ruling the world for all times.  Confucius took 242 years of the history of the state of Lu and made it into a history of mankind, taking the reality of the various countries of the Spring and Autumn period as that of the world at large.  The prescriptions found in the Spring and Autumn Annals express Confucius’s great method to rule the world in a kingly fashion, hence this classic reveals in most concentrated form the political wisdom and basic principles by which Chinese culture can deal with tianxia issues (‘tianxia’ issues are what we today call ‘the clash of civilizations’ or issues in international relations).  For this reason, discussions seeking to resolve tianxia issues in today’s China will go nowhere if they ignore the meaning and wisdom of the Spring and Autumn Annals.  According to the editors, the purpose of the ‘tianxia series’ is to set aside the Social Darwinist principles of international relations that pit strong versus weak, which is precisely why Confucius composed the Spring and Autumn Annals—‘to return the world to justice, having abandoned the current chaos.’  Thus what is expounded in the Spring and Autumn Annals, the social and moral principles of human-heartedness, justice, ritual and yielding meant to govern the world forever more, are precisely the same as the kingly Confucian plan that will replace Social Darwinist principles in international relations."

Later on, this proposal, its Confucianism somewhat diluted and supplemented with arguments from economics, was developed further by the Confucian economist Sheng Hong 盛洪 (b. 1954) under the title “tianxia-ism.”[16]  I will not go into detail in this essay regarding Sheng Hong’s arguments on tianxia-ism, and will limit my remarks to one point:  that the differences between Sheng’s book and Zhao Tingyang’s are substantial in terms of standpoint, methodology, arguments, and style.  Nonetheless, the concerns expressed and the discourse employed in the two are very clear.  For instance, both can be read as a response to Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations.  Both are dissatisfied with the current international order led by the West and particularly by the United States, seeing it as a form of hegemony.  Both bring up Kant’s theory of everlasting peace, although they argue that this theory cannot truly solve the problems under consideration, given the inherent limits in the moral character and internal logic of Western culture.  Based on similar observations, both have reservations about the underpinnings of Western political institutions and about certain Western values. 

By contrast, they both believe that China’s ancient tianxia concept and theories of the kingly way possess transcendent intellectual significance and institutional superiority, that they will be able to overcome the domination of the international order by Social Darwinism, and bring lasting peace to the world.    Both also accord a great deal of influence to “family” as the basic unit of value in traditional Chinese culture, and use family principles to explain and develop a set of ideal social relations.  Similarly, they preach the traditional values of human-heartedness, justice and ritual, arguing that these constitute the moral and institutional basis for something that will transcend the existing notions of the proper order.  And finally, even if these two theses about tianxia draw on Western arguments and methods, and to a limited degree acknowledge and employ Western cultural values, their style of argument still contains elements of a China-Western binary, and their vision of what is superior and what is inferior within this binary is very clear.

From the point of view of certain historians, these tianxia arguments, be they philosophical, economical, or based in the Gongyang tradition, all ignore existing historical research, and hence belong to the category of “ahistorical histories.”[17]  Setting aside for the moment the validity of this criticism, it surely raises questions that proponents of tianxia theories should take seriously.  Because in any event, contemporary arguments about tianxia cannot ignore the historical dimensions of the concept, the meaning of which is worth exploring.  And on this front, the most representative work to date is surely Yao Zhongqiu’s 姚中秋 (b. 1966)[18] History of the Chinese Ruling System 华夏治理秩序史, published in 2012.

The History of the Chinese Ruling System is a massive work of two, two-part volumes.  The first volume, “tianxia,” begins with the traditional emperor Yao 尧, and traces the evolution of tianxia ideology.  In Yao Zhongqiu’s reconstruction, “the elaboration of tianxia consciousness and the construction of tianxia mark the beginning of China as a civilization capable of ruling a community of common destiny.”  Following this logic, tianxia began as a geographical concept and later evolved to become a governing concept, in the same way that Chinese civilization evolved from an anthropological concept to a cultural-political concept.  There is no doubt but that this was a huge undertaking whose realization required a great span of time.  In Yao Zhongqiu’s narrative, tianxia began with Yao’s “way of harmony 合和之道,” Shun’s 舜 practice of “joint rule 共治 [with Yu 禹],” Gao Yao’s 皋陶[19] “Way of principle 规则之道,” the distinction between Chinese and barbarian 夷夏之辨, and the Way of ruling through music 乐治之道 of Yi 益[20] and Kui 夔,[21] and only then took form. 

Subsequently, tianxia received the legacy of the Yu 禹, Xia 夏 and Shang 商 reigns, with ups and downs ending in revolution, and following the creative developments implemented by King Wen 文王, King Wu 武王 and the Duke of Zhou 周公, finally took on its complete and perfect form.  Yao’s second volume, “Feudalism 封建,” is focused on Zhou 周 institutions, and provides a detailed discussion of the institutional arrangements and ruling mechanisms of the “tianxia order,” such as the contractual nature of the relationships between rulers and servants, communitarianism 共同体主义, the Way of the Gonghe Regency 共和之道,[22] and matters of ritual and rule by ritual.   

I should emphasize that while Yao’s treatment of China’s ancient tianxia order is largely based in Confucian classics and related sources, his theoretical background in Austrian social theory and English constitutionalism is clearly visible.[23]  This suggests that Yao Zhongqiu does not view the “Way of governing order 治理秩序之道” for which he is searching as being purely Chinese.  In fact, he announces his goal at the very beginning of his book, stating that “this is a book in search of the Way,” which will necessarily be a “great Way, and hence a universal Way.” But because this universality is closely linked to concepts of Heaven and tianxia, it takes on a particular expression and engagement.  Heaven, as the object of worship of ancient man, was clearly characterized by its “absolute and universal nature:” there was nowhere that Heaven did not reach, it blanketed the earth and nurtured all living beings.  Heaven’s universal nature bequeathed to the people of tianxia a universal consciousness, permitting them to understand the universal nature of humanity and facilitating a transcendence over the individuality of particular groups, regions, or customs, developing into what people later called tianxia-ism. 

In the course of his analysis of the distinction between Chinese and barbarian that first developed in the Yao and Shun period, Yao synthesizes the basic characteristics of tianxia-ism.  Tianxia-ism takes the universality of human nature as its point of departure, but the reason that human nature is universal is because all people reside in tianxia.  Of course, there are objective differences in cultural levels, and differences between places are hard to erase, but all of this is relative and fungible.  What is important is that people possess a common temperament 心性, and all people seek a cultural life; they are capable of communicating, and ultimately, through mutual study and accommodation, can live in a common community.  “For this reason, there is only one superior Way of ruling tianxia,” and no separation of inner and outer, “and the superior governing order also must project itself outward from its point of departure, finally attaining all of tianxia, englobing all of humanity.” Of course, this does not mean to suggest a cultural monism, and even less the kind of violent unification represented in history by the imposition of the Qin 秦 system. 

In the second volume of his work, Yao Zhongqiu reveals the characteristics and inner workings of the tianxia order through study of Zhou dynasty rules of mourning 服制 and their relationship to ritual and custom:  as an excellent system of governance, Zhou rituals are capable of self-extension.  Of course, this extension or expansion is not based on conquest or coercion, but instead is achieved through the charisma of the refining influence of learning and art 文德.  The Zhou people “did not alter the ‘customs’ of the various peoples through force; rather, universal institutional norms and the values contained therein contributed to the attractiveness of Zhou civilization, which subsequently spread from the Chinese center to the four corners of tianxia, and from the social elite to the lower levels of society.”  In the course of this process, the tianxia order simultaneously maintained its cohesive strength while preserving diversity.  In Yao’s view, “this is the highest realm of human governance.”

Yao’s monumental History of the Chinese Ruling System  flows like a vast river through the classics and the histories, analyzing institutions and explaining original principles.  There is no lack of engagement with historical documents, nor of imagination and reconstruction based on such engagement.  Yet from the point of view of modern historians who have inherited the May Fourth ideas of seeking truth through science, a project like Yao’s still may be seen as an “ahistorical history.”  On this question, we can note an importance diversion of great significance, a diversion expressed both in the dimensions of ancient versus modern and Chinese versus Western.

As already mentioned, Yao Zhongqiu sees his book as a book “searching for the Way” of the governing system of ancient China, and not a “scientific, objective historical narrative.”  As a result, from the outset he distinguishes himself from “mainstream contemporary history.”  According to his “author’s declaration,” the viewpoint he chose was that of classical historiography, and his method consisted of “taking the classics as history and the histories as classics.”  In Yao’s own words, “classical historiography” was in fact a kind of “science of governance, an important organized part of what Adam Smith called “the science of the legislator.”[24] This is because in the eyes of classical historians, the responsibility of the historian was not simply to record historical facts, and provide people with pure knowledge, but instead to “make moral and historical judgements of historical characters in terms of the ultimate goals of humanity and history, and hence to open wide the gate to the understanding of the great Way, guiding the people forward.”  This type of history is replete with moral and political values, and is itself “a kind of moral force propelling history toward its goals.” 

The reason Yao chose this classical view of history is precisely because modern, scientific history lacks such moral and political values, and hence cannot satisfy the pressing need felt by contemporary Chinese to know and understand the Way of governance.  In addition, the more important reason that modern, scientific history must be rejected is because the acceptance and development of this form of modern knowledge in China also constitutes a process of “de-sinicization.”  This de-sinicization is not expressed solely in terms of a denial or an abandonment of values attached to Chinese tradition, but also in terms of a systemic distortion and complete ignorance of China’s history, culture and tradition and the “Way” contained therein, leading to Yao’s belief that “history as practiced in modern China is in fact an anti-historical history,” and that “this was a mission created for history by Enlightenment intellectuals.” In other words, the practice of history in modern China, which is an important organized component of modern knowledge, discourse, and science, has in fact been constructed through a process of “criticizing those who came before us,” or even “criticizing ourselves from the position of an outside observer.” 

Jiang Qing has an even more direct statement of this ideological, academic and cultural change, shaped by the self-denial and the loss of agency that were characteristic of the period in question.  In an essay entitled “On ‘Using China to Explain China’ 论“以中国解释中国”, Jiang points out:  “We are living in an age in which Western academic discourse rules the world, and whether we want to or not, all of us will most likely will become people who think and talk in terms of Western academic values.”[25]  In such an age, “the basic meaning of Chinese scholarship has been upended, its discursive structure supplanted.  Chinese traditional scholarship has lost both its discursive power and its discursive rights, so that Chinese scholars can no longer think about or discuss problems in terms of China’s own system of meaning, which means that the territory of Chinese scholarship has become a colony of Western scholarship.” 

For this reason, it is urgent to change this situation, which for New Confucians like Jiang and Yao means returning to Confucianism’s own structure of meaning and interpretive framework.  “We must Confucianize the logic with which we think about things, the principles by which we understand the world, the standards by which we judge history, the values by which we guide human life, and the norms for academic scholarship, and use Confucianism’s structure of meaning and interpretive framework to understand China and the world.”  In a word, this is “using China to explain China.” 

Clearly, Jiang’s Introduction to Gongyang Studies and Political Confucianism are experiments in “using China to explain China, as is Yao’s History of the Chinese Ruling System.  In the face of a situation created by a century of “de-sinicization” of the Chinese intellectual world, their goal is to return to China’s classical intellectual tradition, and reconstruct “Chineseness 中国性” through the methodology of “returning to the roots to seek renewal.” 

In fact, rediscovering and establishing “Chineseness” is the intellectual background to virtually all contemporary theories of tianxia, and Yao is not the only one to refer directly to “Chineseness.”  In his study exploring the cultural philosophy of China’s classical concept of tianxia, Chen Yun 陈赟 (b. 1973)[26] also views tianxia as the core notion within ancient Chineseness.  In Chen’s interpretation, tianxia refers to a limitless whole or horizon, the political expression of which is completely different from ideas of “space” emphasized as the “central focus of political consciousness” in the Greek and Western tradition.  This is because from the perspective of ancient China, the basis of politics is found in the notion that “all things find their natures formed and their positions established 各正性命, 物各付物,”[27] which means allowing all things in the world to fulfill their nature. 

The idea of “ruling through virtue 为政以德” “means allowing different individuals to fulfill their nature, for it is only when each individual completes himself in his own way that the people and the ruler will approach the path toward governance.” This meant that the essence of ancient politics was guided by “non-action.”  As the people and the rulers sought out proper government, their responsibility was to maintain the balance and communication between heaven, earth, and man; this is what was called the “Way,” this is what was called “public.”  The highest political goal, i.e., that “tianxia possess the Way,” meant that “all people under tianxia had a path to follow.”  The classical political ideal that “the world is for all 天下为公” meant “hiding the world in the world 藏天下於天下”[28]:  allowing everything that exists to accomplish itself according to its own nature. 

The idea of “place” is also prominent in classical Chinese political thought with its emphasis on all things achieving their basic nature.  If we say that “basic politics” means the opening and the completion of the Way, then this “Way” is linked to the “place” that is “occupies,” which is another dimension of this basic politics, and which forms the basic ethics of political life.  The proper establishment of “place” in political life demonstrates the diversity of political experience and the multiple paths of political participation, in addition to providing the social foundation for a spontaneously developing order. 

Yet as China entered the modern era, the classical “tianxia” idea gradually disappeared, and in the context of the politics of the nation-state, the formerly diverse “places” came to be unified, and the individual was extracted from his ties of family and locality, becoming a legally independent and equal social unit.  “This insistence on ‘overall mobilization’ for the sake of modernity thoroughly uprooted the idea of place, and brought about a fundamental change in the nature of politics,” which also created the complex tension between the Greek notion of politics and the classical Chinese notion of politics, which was “not politics” from the Greek point of view.  In Chen Yun’s view, this tension in part explains “the basic predicament of the existence of the modern Chinese individual.”    

This is a philosophical perspective on the tianxia concept, and is also useful in revealing the “field of vision of ancient Chinese thought” in a comparative, Chinese-Western dimension.  Yet Chen’s view is different from Zhao Tingyang’s previously discussed tianxia theory in that Chen is clearly focused on the realm of modern Chinese knowledge and epistemology, and, even more importantly, he understands tianxia thought as “a cultural-political principle aiming to impact concrete individual lives,” and not as “a model by which to construct a new regime of international relations” or a “political-diplomatic principle.”  From such a perspective, the transition from the tianxia world to the nation-state world in fact brought about a great change in the form of individual existence, and once this change had occurred, “neither tianxia nor the world could again be possible in the context of the life on an individual.” 

The ancient way of life, unconstrained in terms of geography, culture and politics, and which sought ever greater human openness to achieve his potential in heaven and earth, was closed off during this transition.  In Chen’s view, it was just such changes in humanity and life (and not in terms of institutions, political order, or ethics) that constituted the profound crisis encountered by China over the past century, and current efforts underway to construct a Chinese identity based on culture in fact “have not achieved the ‘Chineseness’ in the classical intellectual sense.  Classical ‘Chineseness’ was rooted in place, and through the cultural nature of place, achieved a deep sense of universality and openness through constantly opening itself to other cultural forms.  This continuous attachment to place, together with a constant urge to break through the limits of geography, constituted a process that ultimately opened up all of tianxia, so that all dimensions of the world came to be illuminated.”  By way of contrast, the Chinese “identity” achieved via the nation-state is nothing more than a single place distinguished from the world at large, and is not a holistic tianxia.  In other words, “the modern stance hoping to return to a classical ‘Chineseness’ is at some level a refusal of this same classical ‘Chineseness.’”

Part Four

Chen Yun’s work is a collection of essays published over the past ten years, one of which is a review of Wang Hui’s 汪晖 (b. 1959)[29] The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.  Narrowly speaking, Wang Hui does not talk directly about tianxia, but he employs the same intellectual and epistemological discourse as those who do, and even uses arguments drawn from the same intellectual traditions.  Even more important is that Wang’s masterpiece of intellectual history, more than ten years in the making, develops an expansive vision based on a deep grounding in history.  His theoretical inquiries and self-reflexive discussions paved the way, intellectually speaking, for the discussion of certain themes that tianxia theorists had not yet explored,[30] and built the epistemological and intellectual foundation for certain narratives more directly related to contemporary China.[31]  For these reasons, Wang’s work should be discussed here.

Wang Hui addresses two basic questions, the first of which is “What is the meaning of China (and particularly modern China)?  How were modern Chinese concepts of identity, geography, sovereignty shaped by history?”  The second is, “How should we understand Chinese modernity?  What is the nature of the intellectual transition that China itself acknowledges as having occurred?”  Obviously, these are also the questions addressed by those working on tianxia, and even if tianxia thinkers have different theories, in fact they all offer direct or indirect “answers” to Wang’s questions.

Wang begins with a discussion of common narratives of Chinese history, which in his analysis can be reduced to two:  the narrative of the Chinese empire and the narrative of the Chinese nation-state.  Although the two narratives are structured differently, and have evolved in complex and subtle ways, they are nonetheless based on a binary conceptual structure pitting the (traditional and authoritarian) empire against the (modern and nationalist) state.  At the same time, this binary opposition of empire and nation-state that has come to dominate Chinese studies is in fact “rooted in the European intellectual tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” part of the effort by Westerners at the time to “establish the legitimacy of the European nation-state and the form of its sovereign power.” 

Clearly, Wang argues, this cannot serve as the lens through which to understand China’s modern social evolution, nor can it provide credible answers to the questions raised above.  People long ago noted that, compared to other pre-modern empires, the Chinese empire not only survived for a very long time, but also managed to preserve an incomparable scale and stability.  Moreover, with the advent of the modern era, while other traditional empires quickly dissolved under the crashing waves of nationalism, China was the sole example of a political regime that preserved the territory of its nineteenth-century empire, along with its population and political culture, in a society defined by the categories of sovereignty and the nation-state.  There is no way to explain this from the perspective of the empire/state binary.  Instead, if we want to arrive at a convincing explanation of this phenomenon, we must look within Chinese society, and discover the inner logic of China’s dynamic historical process. 

In this context, Wang points out that modern China is in fact the product of the conscious transformation of empire, and that the national identity that serves as China’s communal ideology is fact rooted in the imperial tradition, rather than being a purely modern creation.  In other words, what was truly new in the political, cultural, and social movements from late Qing times forward, was not the creation of the “national subject,” but instead the “renewal” of a “national subject” that had already existed under the old system, now responding to the pressure of a series of new historical circumstances. 

Wang illustrates the historical evolution of the formation of Chinese “identity” through discussions of the different forms of legitimacy employed by traditional dynasties—particularly of ethnic minority dynasties—and of the relationship between modern movements in support of local dialects and the rise of nationalism in China and elsewhere.  In terms of the first example, Wang argues that orthodox Confucian theory provided a basis for the legitimacy for minority rule by establishing the idea of a “Chinese dynasty” that transcended ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences, a framework for Chinese identity that transcended ethnic identity.  This was a kind of “egalitarian Chinese identity” that “acknowledged all ethnic groups and their cultural particularities.  Even if dynastic changes were often accompanied by bloody violence, this Chinese identity nonetheless “served as a concept that promoted reconciliation and coexistence among peoples while averting warfare.” 

In terms of the second example, the Chinese regional dialect movement, unlike similar movements elsewhere in the world, did not become a divisive nationalist force, but instead became an expression of increased local diversity within the larger Chinese identity.  As in the case of the first example, modern Chinese national identity “did not dispense with identities based on regionalism, local accents and culture, ethnicity, locality, or religion.” 

Although the object of Wang Hui’s discussion is “China,” readers of the present article will naturally think of our discussion of tianxia:  an open, expansive, inclusive, internally diverse civilizational order that relativizes inner and outer.  This of course relates to our understanding of China.  “Is China an empire or a nation-state, or an empire pretending to be a nation-state?  Is China a political concept, or a civilizational or cultural concept?”  Wang raises these questions in such a way as to interrogate concepts often included in discussions of China and tianxia:  empire, civilization, and culture.

Kang Youwei understood China as a civilizational or cultural concept; in his eyes, “China” was “neither a nation-state, nor an empire, but rather a cultural symbol and vehicle.”  At present, this kind of “China” is understood as a “combination of state and civilization” where “the body of the state and the body of the civilization overlap,” which is the same thing as tianxia.[32]  Some people come right out and refer to this kind of state as a “civilization-state,” or as “a civilization pretending to be a state.”[33]  All such views of China are based on one particular viewpoint: that modern China is not an ordinary nation-state, a judgement that, either overtly or covertly, is grounded in the empire/state dichotomy discussed by Wang Hui.  Some authors are inspired by this concept, which allows them to keep their understanding of China as unique, and at the same time to transcend notions of orientalism; the idea of a “civilizational-state” can explain China’s rise, the China model, China’s future, and China’s mission in the world.

As Zhang Weiwei 张维为 (b. 1957),[34] the champion of the “civilizational-state” puts it, “China’s rise is the rise of a ‘civilizational-state.’”  What he means by “civilizational-state” is “a state in which an ancient millennial civilization is almost completely replicated in the form of a modern state,” and China is the only example of such a state in the world.[35]  In other words, modern China is neither an extension of the traditional empire, masquerading as a nation-state, nor is it a nation-state as conventionally understood, but rather an amalgam of the two:  “China is first of all a modern state, but the various special characteristics of Chinese civilization make China different from other countries.”[36]  In concrete terms, in comparison with modern nation-states, a civilizational-state not only has “a super-large population, a super-vast territory, super-long traditions, and a super-rich culture,” but also has a “unique language, unique politics, a unique society, and a unique economy,” and “each of these contains a mixture of both traditional ‘civilization’ as well as the modern ‘state.’”  As a consequence, this “civilizational-state” with its “superior historical and cultural heritage” “cannot follow in the footsteps of others, cannot copy the Western model or any other model, but can only continue to develop by following its own particular trajectory and logic.”[37] 

Zhang’s description of the “civilizational-state” develops the image of tianxia with which we are already familiar:  the over-sized political body, the “union of one hundred countries” that unites the world’s realms.  We also find the same Chinese/Western, ancient/modern binaries that we see in tianxia arguments:  paternalism 民本 versus democracy 民主, the people’s hearts 民心 versus the will of the people 民意, the family state 家国/tianxia versus the modern nation-state, the kingly Way versus the Way of the hegemon, seeking harmony versus seeking difference, etc.  Zhang’s proposal, based on the argument that China’s rise has been an expression of a “civilizational-state,” that Western discourse must be deconstructed, especially the “’universal values’ to which many Westerners are attached” and replaced by a muscular Chinese discourse, is in fact shared by many proponents of tianxia (not all of them, of course, and the demand is not limited to proponents of tianxia).[38] 

Zhang also argues that, because of its super-particularity, the governance of a civilizational-state must be different, which has led to the formation of China’s “unique perspective on political culture,” which serves as the most important source of legitimacy for Chinese political power.  “The most unique point of this historical legitimacy is the political tradition of ‘meritocracy 选贤任能’ as well as the governing notion of ‘winning the hearts and minds of the people 民心向背.’”  Such traditions and concepts express the political wisdom of the Chinese people, and not only “constitute the main reason that for thousands of years China was considerably ahead of the West,” “but also serve as one of the competitive strengths explaining why the current Chinese model has surpassed the Western model.”

Zhang mentions another unique feature of Chinese politics, which is its “great inclusiveness 包容性.”  “In the past, China had the tribute system 朝贡制度, the vassal state system 藩属制度, the system of border rule by military generals 将军都护府制度, the system of rule by native chieftains 改土归流制度, and the system of local bureaucratic administration 郡县制度,” all of which “naturally found a place for themselves” within a civilizational-state.  Today, China has implemented the rule of “one country-two systems,” and the system of autonomous rule in minority areas, which similarly displays “systemic diversity and flexibility,” all of which is “difficult to imagine in modern Western ‘states.’”

Zhang Weiwei’s style of argument falls somewhere in between mainstream media discourse and political commentary; he takes many positions and offers few proofs.  But on the two points just discussed, other scholars of Zhang’s generation have attempted to arrive at more systematic and more scholarly arguments.  The political scientist Daniel Bell (b. 1964),[39] for example, has sought to develop credible academic arguments concerning China’s meritocracy.  Bell published his arguments first in English, after which they were translated and published in Chinese, and led to great controversy, especially in the English-speaking world of China studies.[40]  As in the case of Zhang Weiwei, Bell presents the concept and implementation “meritocracy” as part of the “China model” and a possible alternative to democracy.[41]  Bell further argues that “the concepts and practice of political meritocracy are the heart of China’s political culture,” and that a form of state governance that combines base-level democracy, mid-level experimentation, and high-level meritocracy, constituting what Bell considers to be a unique feature of the “China model,” is also a superior feature of this kind of model. 

Bell also raises the question of national size, and argues that in choosing and judging the appropriateness of a political system, “the size of the national unit is a decisive consideration.”  This is a standpoint based in feasibility, a standpoint deemed to be more appropriate to the pragmatic culture of East Asian societies.  Thus, just as Zhang Weiwei used the dichotomy of good government and bad government instead of the distinction between democratic and authoritarian rule as a basic measure of judgement, Bell uses the idea of “moral government” to oppose dogmatic defenses of democracy.  Finally, even if Bell does not believe that China’s meritocratic system can be readily exported throughout the world, he still thinks that it poses a genuine challenge to Western democratic systems, and hence does not rule out the possibility that one day the meritocratic system may “become the dominant political system throughout the world.”   

The year before Zhang Weiwei published his China Shock, the legal scholar Jiang Shigong 强世功 (b. 1967)[42] published a series of essays on Chinese Hong Kong.  Even if the title of his book is China’s Hong Kong:  A Political and Cultural Perspective 中国香港：政治与文化的视野, the questions to which Jiang hoped to respond are “what does ‘China’ ultimately mean?”  Indeed, all it takes is a glance at the key words in the table of contents—empire, sovereignty, the Way of the king and the Way of the hegemon, China, revolution, politics, law—to see what the author’s concerns are. 

So:  What is China?  Jiang makes a distinction between the two English words “country” and “state.”  The first is a political organization linked to a designated area, and Jiang emphasizes the internal relationship between citizens and the natural territory of the country where they live, such natural feelings about the land serving to bind the citizens together.”  The latter “is a political organization that relies on an abstract legal system, in which the emphasis is on internal relationship between the ‘citizen’ and the ‘state polity,’ and in which citizens are bound together by law.”  In the English translation of the “one country-two systems” concept, “country” was chosen over “state.”  Jiang believes that this choice “perfectly captured the essence of ‘one country-two systems’ thought,” because, according to judgements based on the political philosophy of the modern state, arrangements like those of “one country-two systems” are illegitimate, and in practice lead to all sorts of problems when the name does not fit the reality.[43] 

In Jiang Shigong’s view, however, this is the very expression of the uniqueness of the Chinese state:  China is a “’civilizational-state’ that took form over the course of history, and not a man-made ‘nation-state.’”  Moreover, the legitimacy of the return of Hong Kong [to Chinese rule], in terms of political philosophy, has nothing to do with the social contract theory of the modern state, but is instead a legitimacy based on tradition and history…For this reason, the ‘country’ in the context of the ‘one country-two systems’ framework, not only goes against the modern state in terms of institutional structure, its basis in political philosophy also goes against the theory of the modern state, and this highly imaginative structure and theory comes straight out of China’s classical political tradition. 
The theory Jiang is referring to is tianxia theory.

As we have seen in the case of other tianxia theorists, Jiang Shigong is defining the special characteristics of “China” on the basis of a comparison with Western thought on law and politics.  For example, he argues that the Chinese feudal system, the Roman Republic, and the British Empire all embraced the principle of difference, but that understandings of this idea in East and West diverged widely. Difference in the West was grounded in ethnicity, while in China it was grounded in civilization and moral cultivation.  Difference in the West was marked by a strong tendency toward division and antagonism, while difference in China was more relative, and mutual transformation was possible. 

Resolving the tense relationship of binary antagonism in the Western dynamic required the transformation, assimilation, or destruction of the “other,” while in contrast, the “universal harmony 天下大同” proposed by Confucian culture allowed for differences that could be “harmonized without assimilation 和而不同.” This latter approach, moreover, “placed greater emphasis on the reciprocal relationship of the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’ within [anthropologist Fei Xiaotong’s concept of] the differential mode of association 差序格局, as well as the moral responsibility of the ‘center’ toward the ‘periphery.’”[44]  This is also the spiritual sense of the “one country-two systems” concept. 

Discussing the evolution of this concept and its historical heritage, Jiang stresses that one country-two systems was not a temporary strategic consideration of China’s central government, nor was it something that Deng Xiaoping created in the 1980s.  As an institutional arrangement and in terms of principles and basic spirit, “one country-two systems” is of a piece with Ye Jianying’s 叶剑英 (1897-1986) 1981 Nine Proposals, presented to the Taiwan government by China’s central government, or even the much earlier “Seventeen Point Agreement” which was part of the “Basic Law Concerning the Central Government’s Rule over Tibet.”  This means that before Deng Xiaoping took power, Mao Zedong had already laid the intellectual foundation for the one country-two systems arrangement through his handling of the Tibet question. 

And this idea, Jiang continues, “in fact traces its origins to the political techniques employed by China’s dynastic rulers to govern the border areas.”  In turn, this means that the way in which the Chinese Communists handled the Hong Kong question (which of course also includes Macao and Taiwan as well as the earlier case of Tibet) “illustrates that at the deepest level, the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party is in fact an extension of the traditional Confucian idea of tianxia.  This notion of tianxia transcends ideas of class or ethnicity, as well as ideas of national sovereignty,” and “only by understanding the uniformity of the theory of the Chinese Communist Party and that of traditional Confucianism can we understand the unique nature of the Chinese revolution.”[45] 

Gan Yang 甘阳 (b. 1952)[46] called this link between Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, and the Confucian tradition “unifying the three traditions,” in the language of Confucian Gongyang Studies, and, not coincidentally, both Jiang’s book on China’s Hong Kong and Gan’s book on unifying the three systems are published in the same collection (“Culture:  China and the World”), the chief editor of which is Gan Yang. 

In the preface explaining why he wrote his book, Gan Yang emphasized the following points:  First, in terms of China’s relationship to the world, “what we call ‘China’ is not simply one ‘country’ among many in the United Nations, but first and foremost is the mother of a great civilization.”  Second, “the rise of a truly great country is necessarily the rise of a country with a great culture; only those states with deep preexisting civilizational strength have the wherewithal to rise up as great countries.”  Naturally, China possesses just such resources and preconditions.  Third, and sadly, the “great cultural capital” accumulated by China’s civilization “has yet to be properly deployed by the modern Chinese people, because for the past century, the Chinese people have been looking at the world through the lenses of Western theories and concepts limited in time and space, to the point that it has become natural to think that Western theories and concepts are universal.”  Many of the views of the West that have emerged from this process, as well as many views of China, are in need of critical review.  For this reason, Gan’s fourth point is that we need to “re-understand China, and re-understand the West, re-understand tradition, and re-understand modernity.”  Finally, number five, is that through this effort, “Chinese intellectual and academic culture” will move toward maturity, the sign of which will be the “ever increasing maturity of the independent viewpoint of the agency of Chinese civilization.”[47]

Clearly, Gan Yang’s arguments and judgements are fairly representative of the intellectual discourses discussed in the context of the present article; we might even see them as a sort of consensus expression of those views.  Even if the various authors discussed do not share the same discipline, and even if they structure their arguments differently and rely on different intellectual resources, even if the questions they address are not identical and their starting points are different, nonetheless they all more or less take “China’s rise” as their background and emphasize China’s special nature as a civilizational state, and all argue that this special nature and its great value have not been correctly understood. 

Hence they all conclude that we must arrive at a new understanding of China, that we must return to Chineseness, establish the agency of Chinese culture, and understand the world through a perspective that is truly Chinese.  In this light, they are all critical of the discourse of Western universalism that has dominated Chinese thought and scholarship for the past century, and point out the limitations of political, legal and social theories based on Western experience, as well as the emptiness of the mainstream discourse on universal values.[48]  As the vehicle for these arguments, tianxia theory is clearly marked by a nativist coloration and a critical dimension, which has prompted any number of criticisms and responses.

Part Five

​The responses to the tianxia theories discussed above can be divided into three groups, according to their form.  The first group consists of direct criticisms of tianxia theory; the second consists of theoretical proposals meant to replace theories like tianxia theory; and the third are other tianxia narratives that differ from those already presented.  The first group can also be subdivided in terms of their concrete discussions into particular criticisms and overall criticisms.  The many discussions that followed the publication of Zhang Tingyang’s Tianxia System naturally fall into this first category, as do the discussions of Daniel A. Bell’s (b. 1964) work on meritocracy and Jiang Shigong’s work on Hong Kong.  In addition, some commentators raised questions about the familiar idea of tianxia, or pointed out problems with its application, or, by contrast, suggested effective ways to put it into practice.  However, given that the point of the present text is not to explore the original meaning of tianxia, but rather to sort out its place in contemporary discourse, we are most interested in overall critiques of the idea. 

The South Korean scholar Yông-sô Paek 白永瑞 (b. 1953) was perhaps the first foreign scholar to offer a comprehensive analysis of tianxia theories in contemporary China.  In an article that he published in Chinese in early 2014, Paek develops his argument around the term “empire” (not the same as “imperialism”), and groups popular concepts like the tribute system, civilizational states and tianxia theories together as part of the discourse of empire.[49]  In the introduction to Paek’s article, in addition to frequently mentioned arguments like those of Lucien Pye (1921-2008) and Martin Jacques (b. 1945), we also encounter the points of view of various Korean and Japanese scholars, such as Yu Yongtae 柳镛泰 and his argument that the “theory of the Chinese people 中华民族论” has “internalized the structure of empire, Kim Yingap’s 全寅甲’s “imperial nation-state 帝国性国民家,” and Shiroi Satoshi’s 白井总 “China as empire.” 

All of these concepts were viewed as helpful in understanding modern China.  But Paek notes that more recently, when certain Chinese intellectuals began taking up the concept of the civilizational-state, they were doing so as part of “an expression of self-confidence following China's non-Western modernization, and as an affirmation of Chinese civilization.  The representative figure in this is Gan Yang.”  Moreover, “there is no way to ignore the Chinese nationalist aspirations in these proposals.”  And outside of the “civilizational-state,” Paek continues, there is also the “’tianxia’ concept, which is broadly used to spread the discourse of empire.”  Here, Paek is basically discussing Zhao Tingyang’s Tianxia System, although he also brings up “new tianxia-ism”[50] which I will discuss below. 

Paek’s doubts and concerns regarding the discourse of empire surrounding the idea of tianxia seem to focus on one particular point, which is that tianxia ignores the voices and propositions from surrounding countries, in the absence of which it would never achieve the universality it claims to pursue, or, to put it more bluntly, it would become a new hegemonic power.  In addition, in Paek’s view, despite the tendency to explain China’s discourse of empire using something other than the Western concept of sovereignty by emphasizing continuities with history and tradition, this may not in fact accord with historical realities, given that it is of a piece with the idea of “rethinking China, remaking China” (Paek cites Zhao Tingyang here).  To Paek’s mind, “the discourse of empire should be replaced by ‘empire as a project.’”  For the same reason, Paek argues that the academic world should adopt an active viewpoint in engaging in this discourse, but Paek’s means of engagement is to propose a view from the “front lines 核心现场” of China’s “peripheries.”  Examples of these “front lines” include Taiwan, Okinawa and the Korean peninsula.  Paek’s voice thus comes from one of these “front lines.”[51]

Another voice from the front lines (what Jiang Shigong calls the “margins”) is the culturally powerful voice of Chan Koonchong (Chen Guanzhong 陈冠中, b. 1952),[52] who speaks from Hong Kong.  After the publication of Jiang’s China’s Hong Kong, Chan published a long article entitled “Chinese Celestialism and Hong Kong 中国天朝注意与香港” which is critical of Jiang’s views.  Before engaging Jiang directly, Chan first discusses “a certain political ideology” which in Chan’s view contains three basic elements: 

First, the idea that China is not a nation-state or an empire in the modern (Western) sense; second, that the contemporary system of party rule in China is…a product of ‘the heritage of traditional Chinese politics;’ third, that the Great Qing Empire was the ultimate expression of the political perspective of the traditional Chinese tribute system, and also serves as the model for the present and future China political imagination.

Chan calls this discourse “Chinese celestialism.”  He believes that this is similar to buzzwords like the “China model” or the “Beijing Consensus,” and that “Chinese celestialism” is a description of the current state of China, especially in the sense that despite various problems with the economic system, in a political sense, it is a “leading ideology in terms of norms and structures.” More than other buzzwords, “Chinese celestialism” possesses an “even stronger claim to traditional culture and a more conflictual stance in terms of politics at the margins, as well as vast ambitions based in a ‘great’ or ‘lengthy history.’”  In addition, because “Chinese celestialism” contains many “historicist readings and future demands” regarding the present system, it “increases the future unpredictability of China’s political and economic system.”  From his position at the “margins,” Chan Koonchung has two points to make regarding Jiang Shigong’s arguments concerning China and Hong Kong. 

First, a centralized regime which claims to have inherited the political principles of a traditional empire, and which poses as civilizational-state and a “celestial country” that transcends modern notions of sovereignty, cannot but provoke reactions of fear and suspicion in smaller surrounding countries, especially those that have not been independent for very long.  Chan questions whether this is truly in modern China’s interest. 

Second, and concretely related to Hong Kong:  even if “in terms of its orientation, celestialism maintains the ‘pluralism’ of the ‘one country-two systems’ formula, the tendency is nonetheless to see China’s rule of Hong Kong as “an extension of central rule, a technique of the center’s adapting to local conditions,” rather than a system in which “local people exercise their rights to self-governance,” and will reduce the weight of constitutional rule in the special administrative territories and increase mutual suspicions between the center and the peripheries.” 

From another perspective, “the structure of the argument for celestialism will tend to ‘depoliticize’ the special administrative areas, and will view the special regions as passive objects of central control.”  Developments in this direction “will be relatively unable to deal with the sense of agency which has long since developed in the regions,” and will not only produce a cognitive gap with current conditions in the special administrative regions, but also weaken the center’s ability to understand and develop Hong Kong, and perhaps even create misjudgments in terms of governing strategies.”

At was at this moment, and in agreement with the criticisms raised by Paek and Chen, that the historian Ge Zhaoguang 葛兆光 (b. 1950)[53] published his article entitled “The Imagination of ‘Tianxia:’ The Politics, Thought, and Scholarship behind a Utopian Imagination 对‘天下’的想象: 一个乌托邦想象背后的政治，思想和学术,”[54] which carries out a systematic sorting out and criticism of all of the tianxia arguments.  Ge’s article is exhaustive in its research, with abundant citations concerning the main figures, arguments and discussions surrounding tianxia, which makes it clear that Ge’s text was not composed impulsively, but was instead the result of extensive reading and reflection. 

Ge begins with history, less because he is himself a historian, and more because he feels that most tianxia arguments have ignored existing historical research on tianxia and hence are nothing more than “ahistorical histories,” or even “imagined histories that go against history itself, which at best merely express a sort of romantic yearning or lofty ideal,” a parody of wishful thinking.  These arguments can also be seen as historical issues caught up in the rapid rise in recent years of the Kang Youwei craze, which has accompanied the development of tianxia arguments, or as part of the rediscovery of the Gongyang tradition carried forward by Kang Youwei.  Because this school of Gongyang thought is “most capable of stimulating the imagination of a modern tianxia,” as well as an important intellectual source for the reconstruction of tianxia, Ge devotes two parts of his article to a careful analysis of it. 

In Ge’s view, certain contemporary scholars (mainly Jiang Qing and Wang Hui, as well as the many scholars involved in “returning to Kang Youwei”) endorse an overly modern interpretation of the Gongyang tradition, and especially of the Gongyang tradition of the mid- to late Qing.  This interpretation has been removed from its historical context, to the point of distorting its original meaning in order to fit preconceived ideas, so that “certain idealistic arguments found in traditional Confucian texts on tianxia have bit by bit come to be interpreted as a modern version of ‘tianxia-ism.’”

Outside of the academic world, Ge also discusses the political and intellectual background to the rise of tianxia theories.  He notes in his article that at the outset, “tianxia-ism” appeared as a counterpart to “nationalism,” in a manner similar to that of “internationalism,” but was very quickly transformed into a “nationalism masquerading as internationalism.”  The simple reason for this was “the excitement and stimulation of what we call ‘China’s rise,” but equally important were “changes in mainstream political ideology on the Chinese mainland over the past few decades…China gradually abandoned its stance of ‘hiding its light under a bushel,’ or its strategy of “not arguing [about whether China’s path was socialist or capitalist]” associated with the early period of reform and opening, and began to pursue the ‘China dream’ of becoming a ‘superpower.’” 

Against this backdrop, certain critical theories originating in the West, such as Said’s theory of Orientalism or Hart and Negry’s theory of imperialism, came to be widely accepted in China, and, according to Ge, “set in motion the rise of nationalism and statism, which had long lay just beneath the surface of Chinese intellectual life.”  The same forces fed “the urge to purge the feeling of ‘a century of humiliation,’ thoughts of criticizing ‘modernity’ and the ambition of reviving the ‘tianxia’ system.” 

Consequently, with the help of poorly defined or even specious concepts like “empire,” “tianxia,” and “civilizational-state,” many tianxia theorists “made historical China out to be something unique, on the one hand in the hope of dressing up China’s ancient tribute system as something very civilized, and on the other allowing modern China to circumvent the constraints of the modern system.”  As an historian, Ge Zhaoguang argues that he “truly cannot approve of this clumsy overinterpretation, nor this process of imagination that requires removing a concept from its historical context.” 

​And Ge’s greatest fear is that from the outset, concealed within ancient China’s ‘tianxia’ order were notions concerning the distinction between Chinese and barbarian, between inside and outside, between superior and inferior, and that the strategy of ‘returning to the king of tianxia,’ achieved through much blood and fire, might, under the pretext of ‘purging the century of humiliation,’ and ‘promoting Chinese civilization,’ turn ‘tianxia-ism’ into a nationalism camouflaged by the flag of internationalism, a means of achieving the ‘great dream’ of contemporary China’s domination of the world against the backdrop of China’s rise. 

Ge Zhaoguang states that he is incapable of offering a final judgement of “tianxia-ism,” but expresses deep reserves concerning the superiority of the notion of “tianxia.”  His final question is:  Why is it that the solution proposed by China’s tradition Confucians is the “kingly Way,” while that of modern Western thought is the “Way of the hegemon?”  “This inevitably brings us back to the origin of the question:  Who is the author of the world system?  Who decides the legitimacy of this system?”

In fact, Ge the historian was not without an answer to his own question.  In an article published two years later on the “political demands of Mainland New Confucians,”[55] Ge makes clear the political standpoint that had remained obscure in his article on tianxia.  In his article on the Mainland New Confucians, a more direct challenge to those he was discussing, the previously mentioned volume of “contemporary Confucians on universal values,” became an object of overt criticism by Ge because of its “reckless language” and “outspoken claims.”  In the face of Mainland New Confucians’ decision to fashion a political Confucianism, to “move from cultural engagement to political participation,” Ge felt “stunned,” and their “shocking political plans” left him “amazed.”  That Mainland New Confucians had drawn a line in the sand between “modern Western values” such as liberty, democracy, and human rights, once embraced by Chinese thought, meant that they had started down a road to “extremism.” 

And as an answer to the question, based in the idea of “returning to Kang Youwei,” of “How to protect this multi-ethnic state carried over from the Qing empire?” Ge’s reply is that “maintaining a unified China, reducing conflicts among the ethnicities, and establishing a modern national identity, should be accomplished on the basis of justice, freedom and democracy.  What other path is possible to promote identification with the system, to honor the ‘citizen’ status of all individuals, to provide all citizens with safety, happiness and self-respect, leading them in turn to self-consciously assume their status as citizen and identify with the country?”

Part Six

Clearly, the emergence and popularity of the idea of tianxia conveyed the excitement felt by the academic and intellectual world in China in response to various internal and external stimuli, and at the same time, this excitement itself served in turn as a bracing stimulus within the same academic and intellectual world.  As a response to this, direct criticisms of tianxia like those offered by Ge Zhaoguang were clearly not sufficient.  What was needed was a theory that could replace it and offer some balance.  In fact, such theories and proposals do indeed exist, and what is intriguing is that the best-known proposal seeking to oppose tianxia theories came to be known as the “new tianxia-ism.”[56]

Professor Xu Jilin 许纪霖 (b. 1957),[57] whose earlier publication of Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment in Contemporary China 当代中国的启蒙与反启蒙[58] offered a penetrating study of trends in the contemporary Chinese thought world, from the beginning clearly paid attention to the tianxia ideas that were destined to become the focus of discussion.  In 2015, Xu published a special issue[59] on “New Tianxia-ism and the Contemporary World,” in volume 13 of the journal Essays on Intellectuals 知识分子论丛, which he edited, the first article of which was Xu’s “New Tianxia-ism and China’s Internal and External Order.”[60]  This essay[61] belongs to a series of others, published before and after, all touching on subjects related to China’s modern transition, nation-building and self-identity.  These essays in turn became part of yet another new book, Family-State and Tianxia:  Individual, State, and World Identities in Modern China 家国天下：现代中国的个人，国家与世界认同.[62]

Like Zhao Tingyang, the starting point of Xu Jilin’s thinking about tianxia is his dissatisfaction with the current state of the world, and this dissatisfaction is linked to the roles played by nationalism and statism in the present age.  The difference between the two is that Zhao’s dissatisfaction is with the lack of order in a nationalist world, while Xu’s dissatisfaction is first with China, and with the increasing number of tense internal and external situations China has faced over the course of its rise.  Xu Jilin believes that the basic factor producing these tensions is the “idea of the supremacy of the nation-state,” introduced into China from the West in the late nineteenth century, and which has since become the “dominant way of thought” of the entire society.  The way to counter this, in Xu’s opinion, is to establish a mode of thought that goes against nationalist thinking, a mode of thought that he calls “new tianxia-ism.”

As the name suggests, “new tianxia-ism” has its roots in China’s ancient tradition, which is what we today call the civilizational tradition of tianxia-ism.  The main feature of this civilizational tradition is that “the values of tianxia are universal and humanitarian, and the unique possession of one nation or state.”  Even if ancient Chinese talked about “the distinction between Chinese and barbarian,” this distinction “was not a fixed, racialized concept, but was rather a relative cultural concept that contained the possibility of communication and transformation.”  A tianxia-ism with universal concerns “was concerned only with the question of the character of these values. It did not ask ethnic questions about ‘mine’ or ‘yours,’ but absorbed everything that was ‘good,’ connecting ‘you’ and ‘me’ in an integrated whole which became ‘our’ civilization.” 

Sadly, after modern China imported nationalism from Europe, the civilizational spirit of this tianxia-ism basically disappeared.  Xu Jilin also cites Lucien Pye’s famous remark that China is a civilization pretending to be a state, arguing that in fact the situation is the opposite, that contemporary China is actually a state pretending to be a civilization, “because it uses the methods of the nation-state to govern a massive empire, and in international affairs and conflicts regarding its own interests, it relies on a mentality that accords absolute primacy to national supremacy.”  As noted above, this is what Xu considers to be the crux of the issue.  For this reason, what today’s China must do is not only accomplish the revival of the people and the state, but also “the redirection of its nationalistic spirit toward the world,” or in other words, “what China needs to reconstruct is not just a particularistic culture suited to one country and one people, but rather a civilization that has universal value for all humanity,” which is “the new tianxia-ism that will emerge in the form of universal values.”

As for what is new about the “new tianxia-ism,” Xu Jilin emphasizes two points:  first, that it must be de-centered and non-hierarchical; and second that is must be a tianxia that creates a new universalism.  The first point is related to the China-centered “power/civilizational order” of traditional tianxia-ism with its sense of hierarchy and difference, and the method Xu proposes begins from “the principle of the sovereign equality of nation-states” according to which, internally, China must realize legal equality between the Han and other ethnic minorities, and externally, respect the sovereignty of other countries and live in peaceful coexistence with them.  He calls this the “politics of recognition.”  The latter point is directed at “the narrow perspective that places national interest above all else,” and Xu argues that China must employ universalism as a counterweight against particularism, and use the principles of universal civilization to constrain national sovereignty.  He calls this a “commonly shared universalism.”  This kind of “new tianxia is a mutual transcendence of both traditional tianxia-ism and the nation-state.”

Xu’s proposition to substitute “the principle of the sovereign equality of nation-states” for the hierarchy and difference of the “power/civilizational order” is easy to understand from the perspective of international relations, but how do we get to a “new tianxia-ism made up of a commonly shared universalism?”  Xu explains that the universalism of the past tianxia was based on a certain core people, but once this people directed its spirit toward the world, it created the universal civilization which is part of the new tianxia-ism, one that “does not emerge out of the variation of one particular civilization but instead a universal civilization that can be mutually shared by many different civilizations.”  This universalism will be “characterized by the ‘overlapping consensus’ of all civilizations and cultures,” thus bringing to fruition the Confucian ideal of “harmony without assimilation 和而不同.”  Xu also cites an analysis by the Taiwanese scholar Qian Yongxiang (Sechin Yeong-Shyang Chien) 钱永祥 (b. 1949) concerning three types of universality, in which he points out that the claims to universality of any state, people, or civilization necessarily “deny the universality of the other.” [63] 

By contrast, the “universal values” proposed by liberalism from the position of “value-neutrality” of which it is so proud, because they “disregard the internal differences that exist between different cultures and civilizations,” belong to a kind of “transcendent universalism.”  As for the “commonly shared universalism” of new tianxia-ism, “it does not seek to establish the hegemony of one particular civilization among many different civilizations, cultures, peoples, and nations, nor does it belittle the particular paths taken by major civilizations. Instead, it seeks dialogue and the achievement of shared commonality through equal interactions among multiple civilizations,” and thus represents a kind of “universality based on recognition of the other.”

At this point, people might wonder where, in fact, we might find this “universalism commonly shared by the people of tianxia,” this “’overlapping consensus’ achieved through interactions between different civilizations and different cultures.”  What concrete form does it take?  Xu Jilin provides a preliminary answer to this question:  In an earlier essay, he talks about the “universal civilization and universal human rights of the modern Enlightenment,” that “transcends the civilizations of the axial ages,” and argues that this can serve as a harmonious foundation for all civilizations.  In more concrete terms, this foundation consists of “freedom, democracy, the rule of law, human rights, peace, and justice as defined by the various proclamations and decisions of the United Nations, and which make up the value system of universal civilization.”[64]

This essay will not explore in detail how new tianxia-ism might be applied to China’s internal and external order.  I will merely cite the last paragraph of Xu’s essay, to give an overview of Xu’s proposals:

"Traditional empire is different from the modern nation-state, which seeks to homogenize and incorporate everything into a single system. In traditional empire, the internal order honored diversity in the realm of religion and institutional governance, and the external order was an integrated political, commercial, and ethical network, one that placed the mutual benefits of the tribute system at its center, sharing in international trade. The traditional empire’s tianxia wisdom can provide us with insights today in the following ways: the overly singular and uniform logic of the nation-state cannot, internally, resolve the minority issues in the border regions, while externally it is not helpful in easing conflicts over political sovereignty with neighboring countries. To the unified logic of the nation-state should be added the flexible diversity and multiple-systems of empire, providing balance. In sum, in the core regions of China, “one system, different models” should be implemented; in the border regions, “one nation, different cultures” should be realized; in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, “one civilization, different systems” should be experimented with; in East Asian society, “one region, different interests” should be recognized; in international society, “one world, different civilizations” should be constructed. In this way, the internal and external order of the new tianxia can be established, creating the conditions for the mutual co-existence, indeed the mutual benefit, not only for all of China’s domestic ethnicities but for all East Asia’s nations, creating a new universalism for a future world order." 

What needs to be pointed out is that even if, on the surface, Xu’s essay seems not to engage directly with other tianxia theorists, in fact his text is a direct confrontation.  For example, Xu stresses the distinction between civilization and culture, and argues that the former is about “what is good” or even what is universally good, while the latter concerns merely “what is ours.”  This is directly aimed at arguments based on China’s uniqueness.  He also draws a special distinction between two objectives of the late Qing strong-country dream:  civilization on the one hand, and wealth and power on the other.  Xu argues that civilization contains value goals and ideals, including universal values such as freedom, democracy, equality, and justice, while the objectives sought in the context of wealth and power are divorced from values, and are purely technical.  Here, Xu is addressing the ever-popular ideal of nationalism.  He also points out the inadequacies of traditional tianxia-ism, especially the hierarchical distinction between center and periphery established on the basis of receiving the mandate of heaven, arguing that the time for this is long past.  In this context we cannot help but think of all of the theories of the heavenly mandate currently making the rounds. 

Xu clearly notes that new tianxia-ism must transcend “any kind of Sino-centrism,” as well as Euro-centric views, “it does not imagine that any particular civilization will represent the twenty-first century.”  We need “a Kantian universalism and an everlasting peaceful order.  The universal principle of world order cannot take the rules of the game of Western civilization as its standard, but neither can this principle be built on the logic of resistance to the West.”  Such remarks are clearly directed at arguments frequently encountered in the works of tianxia theorists.

Also worth noting is the role that China will play in the process of elaborating and implementing this new tianxia-ism.  In his essay on “How Can China Present itself to the World as a Civilized Great Country? 中国如何以文明大国出现于世界?” which is addressed to Yao Zhongqiu’s argument that this is “China’s moment in world history,”[65] Xu asks:  “Is China herself ready to respond to her moment in world history?  How will China present herself to the world?  As a follower of Western civilization?  As a challenger?  Or as a developer?  And another question:  Who’s world history is it?  And what kind of ‘China’s moment’?” 

Xu observes:  “The twenty-first century world is facing a complex scenario unseen over the past few centuries, which will change and bring an end to Western control of history,” which of course does not mean that China will be the center of the world.  In any event, “employing China’s tianxia wisdom to reconstruct the plural civilizational order of the future world is a desirable path to follow.”  This is because, in this era of “post-axial civilization,” when the past monotheistic civilizational order of Europe and America will be replaced by a polytheistic civilizational order, “the concept of harmony in Chinese Confucian civilization can contribute important Eastern wisdom to the construction of the world’s new polytheistic order.”  To Xu, this is what is meant by “China’s moment,” and the arrival of this moment “will not simply be a matter of China’s participating in the existing world order, but instead must mark the moment when China’s wisdom redefines world history and changes the world order.” 

The problem is that, over the course of the past century, China has lost track of “civilization” in its pursuit of wealth and power.  “China’s rise, to this point, has only been the rise of wealth and power, and not the rise of civilization.”  “Should we wish to continue to develop and become a world-nation capable of changing tianxia, then the next step is the rise of civilization.”  However, you do not accomplish the rise of civilization all by yourself, but rather by “complying with mainstream civilization,” by “absorbing the universal values recognized by all axial civilizations and nation-states,” and “creating and developing” the existing order on that basis.  Only in this way can China “truly become a world-nation, and Chinese civilization truly make a great contribution to humanity.”

This essay ends with the question “Is China ready?”  Clearly, Xu Jilin’s answer is no.  For this reason, Xu offers hope and guidance on the question of “China’s moment.”  In any event, as we have seen in the case of other tianxia theories, Xu Jilin has great confidence in China’s rich civilization.  Because, as Xu argues, “China is not an ordinary people, but instead has been a world people since Pangu 盘古[66] separated heaven and earth, a people with concern for tianxia-ism, a people that takes responsibility for the spirit of the world.”  In recent arguments about tianxia, we find two diametrically opposed responses concerning this confidence and hope in China or the Chinese people.

In June of 2017, the influential journal Foreign Affairs published an article by the American sociologist Salvatore Babones (b. 1969).  The title of the essay is “American Tianxia:  When Chinese Philosophy Meets American Power,”[67] in which Babones applied the popular Chinese idea of tianxia to the American-led world order.  In his view, today’s United States is no longer merely a country, but rather “the cultural, economic, and institutional center of a world that it has partially recreated in its own image.”  Babones argues that the Western world has yet to settle on an appropriate term to describe America in this broad sense, because the modern West has never before seen a country like contemporary America. 

The last time the world was organized in this way around a single country was in the fifteenth century, when East Asia was organized around the Ming dynasty.  At that point, China was not only the leader and hegemon of East Asia, but was also the core country of a political and cultural kingdom extending from Burma to Japan.  At the time, this world was called “tianxia.”  Most of the tianxia theorists discussed in this essay would probably disagree with Babones’s taking Ming dynasty China as an example of tianxia, but his argument perhaps signals that his view of tianxia is grounded in a more practical vision.  As for those Chinese scholars who talk about the perspective of a new tianxia emerging in the twenty-first century, Babones bluntly asks the question:  Who is the ruler of tianxia? 

In Babones’s view, even if China’s rise in an unchangeable fact, the ruler of tianxia in the twenty-first century will certainly not be China, and can only be the United States.  The United States occupies the central position of all the world’s systems and networks, one result of which is that the United States is not only the world’s favorite place to invest, but, more importantly, is also the favored immigration destination of people throughout the world (which of course includes Chinese people).  The multinational elite coming from China and elsewhere to live in the American tianxia all share a common link with American, and on this basis come to share common values, the most important of which is the American value of individual self-fulfillment. 

Babones writes that: “The idea that ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are inalienable rights is distinctively American, but it is no longer uniquely American. These days, elites all over the world have learned that it is right, even moral, to prioritize their own happiness over traditional national and religious attachments.”  It is precisely because countless individuals throughout the world (especially among the elite) feel this kind of internal relationship with centrally positioned America that the American tianxia transcends the nation-state, and becomes limitless.  Finally, when tianxia is unified in a single hierarchy, what people worry about is climbing up the ranks, and not tearing down the system.  “That makes the American Tianxia more stable than any system the world has ever known, including the old tianxia of Ming China. It may not always be fair, but it is harmonious, and it is here to stay.”

A massive work in Chinese history, appearing at about the same time as Babones’s “American Tianxia,” offers a stark contrast with Babones’s work.  In this strikingly ambitious work, the young Chinese historian Shi Zhan 施展 (b. 1977)[68] uses a Hegelian methodology to offer a new narrative of three thousand years of Chinese history in his The Hub:  Three Thousand Years of China 枢纽：3000年的中国.[69]

From the beginning, Shi’s study addresses the work of scholars such as Zhao Tingyang, Xu Jilin, Ge Zhaoguang and others, all of which are, for Shi, symbols of the “history craze 历史热” that has emerged in China in recent years.  In Shi’s view, this “history craze” reflects “deep concerns about identity,” arising out of profound changes in China and surrounding areas brought about by China’s rise, to the point that past references no longer hold, and even national objectives, based on these previous references, have lost direction.  

​In Shi’s view, the Chinese people “have reached an unmarked intersection, and know not from whence they came or where they are going.”  This has produced, within the spirit of the Chinese people, a thirst for a new historical narrative or a new philosophy of history, which will not simply reproduce the past, but rather “provide a kind of spiritual order, a sense of meaning to the past, defining where we are at present, and outlining our future direction.”  These new histories must “help a people see their future through their past, and at the deepest level, inform a people concerning who they are, what they want, where they are going.”  In a word, this history must answer the very basic question of “what is China?”

Shi begins his argument with the idea that China’s history is unique.  In his view, “the basic uniqueness of Chinese history” reveals itself in two points:  first, China is the vehicle for an axial civilization; second, China’s scale is super-sized.  The first characteristic is linked to universality:  “The special feature of axial civilizations lies in their orientation toward universalism; they think in terms of tianxia, and absolutely not in terms of one people or one place.  Correspondingly, an axial civilization will not define itself as being in charge of a particular ethnic group, but instead is solely concerned about whether civilization itself is being universally transmitted.  This special feature of axial civilizations means that the structure of the Chinese spirit naturally possessed a tendency toward universalism.”  As for the second characteristic, China’s super-sized scale, this was expressed not only in terms of population and wealth, but also in terms of the diversity of China’s geography and the complexity of the order of China’s empire.  These two features were woven together with China’s historical development in a spiraling process by which particularities were continually transformed into universalities. 

For this reason, a new historical narrative must be able to uncover the consistency between particularity, universality, and diversity on the following dimensions:  in terms of space, it must uncover the internal consistency between the area of the North China plain 中原 and areas outside the North China plain, as well as the internal consistency of China and the world; in terms of time, it must uncover the internal consistency between the spiritual phenomena and scholarly logic of ancient and modern histories.  In such a manner, China’s borders will be calm 内安边疆, as will China’s neighbors 外安四邻.  And only in such a manner can the underlying tendencies toward universalism in the consciousness of the Chinese people, as well as the clearly visible attributes of China’s great size and her hidden potential as a world historical people, achieve genuine release so as to be deployed in a constructive direction.

It is up to the readers to decide if Shi accomplished his self-appointed mission.  My goal is provide a simple outline of his basic thought process, so as to better understand “the consistency between particularity, universality, and diversity” so important to Shi’s new historical narrative.

First, as already noted, this is a Hegelian historical narrative, and many of its key concepts clearly come out of the Hegelian toolbox.  The most important of these is that history is understood as a process of the free development of spirit and of self-realization, achieved through a dialectical movement in which particularity is continually subsumed in universality.

Second, the development of Chinese history is seen as having followed this spiritual movement, but this complicated process in which particularity is constantly transformed into universality, which once again becomes particularity, to be subsumed yet again into universality, stopped in the Qing dynasty, when history fell into the dilemma of a historical cycle, which China could not resolve on the basis of its own spiritual resources.  At this point, the mutual encounter between China and Western civilization provided Chinese civilization with another possibility of transcendence.

Third, the revolutions and reforms of the twentieth century have led China to a new developmental phase, the spiritual characteristic of which is the emergence of a “global perspective” through the medium of communism.  “This global perspective is the expression of a vast vision that had never appeared in the course of thousands of years of Chinese history, a refined, superior version of the ideal of universalism in the Chinese tradition,” and which “provides the necessary spiritual capacity” for China to transcend itself.

Finally, looking toward the future, “modern Western value systems of legal rights and legal techniques will be integrated into the Chinese spirit,” which in turn will bring about the “synthesis” of “the particularity and universality of each [i.e., China and the West],” which will ultimately resolve the problems faced by the traditional Chinese empire.  In the course of this process, Western culture will also “break through the obstacles it currently faces, achieving genuine universality.”

Clearly, such a summary of a wide-ranging volume of some seven hundred pages is overly simplistic and abstract, and ignores many subtleties.  For this reason, to supplement what I have said so far, below I discuss the elements of Shi’s argument that relate most directly to the themes of this essay, providing a bit more explanation.

Question one, tianxia.  Clearly, tianxia is not the object of Shi’s discussion, and the term does not appear frequently in his book, but at the same time it is not too much to say that tianxia figures among the core themes of Shi’s work.  This is because tianxia is understood as possessing a “universalistic orientation,” which is in fact the basic feature of China as the vehicle for an axial civilization, which took the form of the “basic particularity of Chinese history.”  Of course, viewing China as “a vehicle for an axial civilization” is the same thing as an argument that China was a “civilizational-state.”

Question two, nationalism.  Compared to concepts like tianxia, nationalism clearly belongs to the category of particularism, and for this reason, even if under particular historical conditions nationalism inevitably becomes legitimate, ultimately it is something to be transcended [from the point of view of universalism].  At present, this transcendence is expressed at two levels:  one is the transcendence of Han chauvinism to arrive at [an inclusive] “Chinese nationalism;” and the second is to transcend “Chinese nationalism” to arrive at a “universalism of all peoples 普世民族主义,” which will finally eventuate in the realization of “China’s world-historical mission.”

Question three, world order.  In his book, Shi argues that “since the age of discovery…the world order has been the exteriorization of the Western order.”  This world order “in principle was for humanity as a whole, but the fact of Western leadership meant that the formal justice it promised was not ‘formal’ enough, and the actual form of justice practiced by the West on other civilizations became in fact a form of oppression.”  For example, in the American-led world order, because “in practice there was no mechanism to counterbalance the unique hegemon’s pursuit of self-interest, its [claims to] universalism came to be doubted.”  Consequently, hopes for a “genuine universal world order” were projected onto a “more open future.”  As the result of repeated interaction “between possibly divergent ideals of universalism,” “there will eventually emerge a universal order that transcends all particular ideals.”  In other words, the ultimate goal is to “allow formal justice to become true formal justice,” and “to allow justice to achieve its proper goals in practice.”

Before concluding our brief reflection on contemporary tianxia theories, I should mention two more books of completely different styles.  One is a best-seller of a few years ago, Wu Jiaxiang’s 吴稼祥 (b. 1955)[70] Tianxia for All  公天下.[71]  The goal of this book can readily make people think of Huang Zongxi 黄宗羲 (1610-1695),[72] and of the critical tradition found within the tianxia concept.  And in fact, one of the central threads of Wu’s work is indeed to provide a critical view of China’s traditional political institutions through the concept of tianxia for all.  Yet Wu’s principal focal point is rather a more functionalist issue:  how does a super-sized political community manage to maintain stability without stifling vitality?

In distinction to the tianxia theorists discussed above, Wu argues that tianxia was not possessed uniquely by China, despite the role it played in Chinese history.  This is because, in Wu’s definition, tianxia first of all is a question of scale:  “What we call tianxia is a political community of considerable scale, without clear borders and containing plural ethnicities.”  He further argues that when the state is combined with civilization, when the political body overlaps with the cultural body, then “this kind of unified body of state and civilization” is called “tianxia.”  According to this definition, political entities in the history of the world that can be called “tianxia” are not limited to the case of Chinese civilization.  At the same time, only China’s tianxia has survived to the present despite having experienced many internal and external traumas. 

This in turn means that over the course of thousands of years, China has constantly faced the stability-vitality question, a political dilemma which, in Wu’s view, China has not solved in the four thousand years since Emperor Yu.  In other words, all political arrangements in Chinese history found themselves somewhere between stability and vitality, without ever achieving the ultimate balance.  The basis focus of Wu’s work is hence to divide up the different types of political arrangements, measure their position in terms of the ultimate balance between stability and vitality, rank these various arrangements and finally to explain the reasons and the mechanisms behind these rankings.  In that case, what does this work of “historical political science” have to do with the tianxia for all idea? 

Wu argues that “the question of vitality and stability in Chinese politics, viewed from the perspective of political practice, is in fact a question of divided powers and centralized powers.”  In historical terms, this refers to the endless debates over the bureaucratic system versus the feudal system, and the tianxia for all ideal is the value basis for the institutional arguments that criticize feudalism.
Clearly, Wu’s tianxia for all comes from the idea of “the world is for all 天下为公” found in the Liyun 礼运 section of the Book of Rites 礼记.  Wu calls this the “one world principle,” whose core contents include the following.   

First, highest state power is not concentrated in one person nor conferred for life, hence the principle of “dynastic change.”  Second, the state is not one person’s private property, hence the idea of “the world is for all” as opposed to “the world is mine 天下为家.”  Third, neither the highest [central] power nor the right to local rule is hereditary, hence the saying that “one must not treat only his sons as sons 不独子其子.”  This ideal was what the ancients thought of as the Way or the Great Way, the “established law of the ancestors of the Chinese people, or in other words, China’s unwritten constitution.”  Even in later periods when China’s rulers practiced instead “the world is mine,” the earlier ideal remained, and even had its place to varying degrees within state institutions.  Concretely, Wu divides these types of regimes into five variants, those that bring peace to tianxia 平天下, those that unite tianxia 兼天下, those that brutalize tianxia 霸天下, those that divide tianxia 分天下, and those that monopolize tianxia 龙天下, and Wu subsequently grades these variants in terms of their ideas, their structure, and the pressure they bring to bear on society.  For example, in terms of concepts, he evaluates the size of the “family 家.”  The bigger the family, the closer the regime approaches to the highest Chinese political ideal, where “tianxia belongs to all.” 

From the point of view of structure, he sees multi-centered rule as superior to rule by a single center, because it is more accommodating to the pressures resulting from scale.  In terms of pressure, lower pressure is better than higher, because the latter means the loss of individual and local autonomy, and the stifling of social vitality and creativity.  Consequently, the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn political regimes created by Kings Wen and Wu and the Duke of Zhou were an example of a polity that “united tianxia,” and because of its “multi-centered governance,” its “unitary feudal order,” and its “anti-pressure politics 负压政治,” it earns Wu’s highest marks. 

By contrast, the regime through which the Qin dynasty achieved victory and the subsequent practices followed by the autocratic system over the course of the dynasties was an example of a polity that “brutalized tianxia,” and its “concentration of power,” its “unitary bureaucratic system” and its “high pressure politics” earned it Wu’s lowest rating.  The problem is that the best regime in Chinese history is not only too distant from the present day, but also was unable to preserve stability on a permanent basis.  And even if the tianxia theorists celebrate the Han, the Tang, and above all the Great Qing, in Wu’s ranking, only the beginnings of these periods stand out as worthy, while the policies of the latter Han, the middle Tang, the Song, Yuan and Ming, as well as the late Qing are all among the worst, grouped together with the Qin, who monopolized tianxia. 

Regardless of this, Wu’s work reveals the principles and mechanisms of Chinese governance, as well as pointing the way out of predicament, as suggested by the sub-title of Wu’s work:  “Multi-Centered Rule and Dual-Level Legal Rights 多中心治理与双主体法权.”  Although it appears in the sub-title, “dual-level legal rights” is a new concept that only appears in the final chapter of Wu’s book, and his explanation of it is extremely simplistic.  To use a concept with which people are more familiar, “dual-level legal rights” is the same as “citizens’ legal rights” together with “local legal rights,” the former being “a new form of authority” and the latter “new multi-centered governance.”  “In the United States, this system of dual-level legal rights means one person-one vote (election rights), a governor for each state 一州一长 (through popular elections) and two votes for each state 一州两票 (in the Senate).  In Western political theory, these are seen as being “in conformity with the constitution” or as part of “federalist democracy.”  These kinds of “dual-level legal rights, in the context of a large-scale political regime, not only serve the function of relieving and equalizing pressure; in terms of structure they serve to stabilize pressure.”  At the same time that they carry out these functions, they also “facilitate the joint achievement of tianxia for all, large-scale unification, creativity and vitality.” 

Here, Wu again employs “dual-level legal rights” to define directly what the “greater public” means in the context of political institutions.  He writes:  “A system with multi-centered governance and dual-level legal rights is what is referred to in this book as ‘the greater tianxia for all,’ the goal of which is to achieve both scale and vitality, surpassing Shun and Yu, approaching and catching up to the United States.”

Let me add two more points of explanation of Wu’s gong tianxia argument.

First, regarding axial civilizations.  Wu brings up axial civilizations twice, but even if he devotes relatively little space to the concept, its importance to his argument is obvious.  On the one hand this is because Chinese civilization was one of four mentioned in Jaspers’s theory of “world historical axes;” another reason is the “’axial age’ was a period of great breakthrough in the spiritual civilization of humanity,” in which the transformation of the human spirit “from myth to rationality, from transcendental to empirical, from particular to universal” was realized.  It is no coincidence that the Chinese people, chosen by Jaspers as one of the axial peoples, achieved their greatest form of government during that period.  In addition, Wu also discovered that the other three great civilizations of the axial age—ancient Greece, Israel, and ancient India—at the time also found themselves in the “age of multi-centered governance,” and all were seeking the “rational principle of ‘universality.’”  By contrast, “In the age of large-scale empire, mankind’s spirit withdrew into the ‘particularity’ of myth and superstition.”  Wu argues that this is perhaps because “despotism needs myths and ghost stories, while autonomy needs reason and reflection.”

Second, on future world civilization.  Although he talks about other civilizations, nonetheless, in distinction to many other tianxia theorists, the object of Wu’s narrative is basically confined to China, and as a result, the “future world civilization” falls outside his realm of discussion.  Nonetheless, two citations in the final chapter provide us with a clue as to Wu’s basic stance on the question.  In both instances, Wu cites himself.  One passage relates to a comparison of the “basic ingredients” of Chinese and Western civilization, and Wu’s basic view is that:  the basic ingredients of Western civilization all derive from the Ancient Greek “logos,” while the basic ingredients of Chinese civilization come from the “Way.” 

One basic difference between the two is that the former seeks self-understanding while the latter is in flux; a second is that the former has only one impulse, which is “exteriorization” or “objectification,” while the latter has impulses toward “exteriorization” as well as “interiorization.”  “If we view exteriorization as diffusion 传播 and expansion 扩张, and interiorization as absorption and nourishing 生养, then Western civilization is a civilization of linear expansion 直线扩张,” and “the ‘process’ of exteriorization or expansion is the constant state of this kind of civilization.”  In another passage, Wu notes that “the exteriorization of the basic ingredients of the Chinese Way is the great ultimate,” which has its own expansive nature, represented by the taijitu 太极图,[73] which has three characteristics:  it is perfect 完善, invincible 无敌 , and inclusive 包容.  The taijitu lacks for nothing, sees nothing as its enemy, and has no fear of contact or of difference; on the contrary “it development is achieved through contact with the other followed by transformation of the elements that can be absorbed.”  “For this reason, Chinese civilization, with the Way as its basic substance, is completely capable of absorbing and including Western civilization, resulting in a world civilization with Eastern characteristics.  We might call it the ‘new civilization of great harmony 新大同文明.”

Clearly, “civilization” is a core concept in all tianxia theories.  Yet what is hard to understand is that while tianxia theorists like to use this concept, they seem to pay little attention to what it means.  This might be because, since late Qing times, the term “civilization” has been widely used in such a way that its meaning is obvious.  At the same time, when tianxia theorists bring up civilization, they generally do so from a macro-historical or philosophical perspective, and perhaps do not feel the need to explore its significance or more recent evolution.  This does not mean, however, that this is an adequate way of dealing with the idea of civilization.  I would argue the opposite, that since China is a vehicle for a kind of civilization, and civilization is one of China’s attributes, then answers to questions like “What is China?” “What is tianxia?” “What is good order or the best political institutions? will to a large degree depend on how the theorist understands the meaning of civilization.  With an eye to this, I now turn to the thoughts on an anthropologist on the question of “civilization and China.”

I mentioned earlier in this essay Levenson’s famous statement on modern China’s intellectual transformation,” that “for the most part, the intellectual history of modern China has been a process of transforming ‘tianxia’ into a ‘nation-state.’”  As we have already seen, in the eyes of many tianxia theorists, this inevitable historical transformation was at the same time a Procrustean process of “cutting off the feet to fit the shoe 削足适履.”  This process created certain basic problems China still faces today, and the resolution of these problems first requires that we return to the standpoint of “civilization” to arrive at a new understanding of China. 

The anthropologist Wang Mingming 王铭铭 (b. 1962)[74] is among those who hold such views, but his encounter with the question is marked by his particular academic background and intellectual attachments.  To put it simply, Wang argues that modern social sciences originally developed in a national context in which the goal was to satisfy the needs of the modern nation-state, and when this particular knowledge system was imported into China, it became what we might call “statist social science” because of the imperative need to “strengthen the country.”[75]  However, as a knowledge tool, this knowledge system, constructed with the nation-state as its basic unit, could not provide a satisfying explanation of China.  This is because China was neither the model nation nor the model state held up by these social science theorists, having conserved its characteristics as a “civilizational body:”  a society in which were found many societies, a culture that included many cultures, a state made up of many peoples.  Older scholars such as Wu Wenzao 吴文藻 (1910-1985) or Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910-2005) called it, respectively, “one country with many peoples 一国多族,” and a “pluralistic order 多元一体,” while Wang Mingming calls it an “ultra-social system 超社会体系.”    According to Wang’s text, by “ultra-social system,” he means the same thing as “tianxia” and “civilization” in anthropological terms, and the reason that China is viewed as “ultra-social system” is because the Chinese people have conserved the idea of tianxia and because China has always been a civilized body. 

On this point, Wang elaborates on the “three-circle theory” of China:  traditionally, there were those identified as “civilized 熟 [lit. “cooked”] who resided in the “core circle,” those who were half-way between civilized and primitive and who resided in a “middle circle,” and finally those viewed as “uncooked 生” who lived in the “outer circle.”  Objectively speaking, these three circles made up the ”Chinese world order,” and subjectively “Chinese world wisdom,” both of which are synonyms of “tianxia,” “civilization,” or the “ultra-social system.”  The same terms serve as part of a “discursive outline” in attempts to re-understand and re-narrate China, an effort seen as necessary “because we find unsatisfactory the separate definitions accorded to society, culture, people, and state in the age of nationalism, as well as the dichotomies imposed by these separate definitions on the centers and peripheries of social entities,” dichotomies such as “economic base and economic superstructure,” “center and locality,” “greater and lesser peoples,” “center and exterior,” etc. 

Moreover, the same discourse means that “explanations of the complexities of the internal social orders of non-Western societies are relegated to the historical or methodological particularities of those societies—those ‘other civilizations,’ ‘other worlds,’ ‘other perspectives’ that the social sciences of modern Western civilization seek out when dealing with non-Western societies.”  And in this context, “the ‘ultra-social system’ as part of the ‘China problem’ represents a kind of historical return to the ‘state’ as being part of a civilizational body,  the point of which is to incite social science researchers working in the age of nationalism to rethink the ‘principles of social order’ and pluralize their notions of society.”

Wang Mingming’s arguments are couched in the language of anthropology, but to this point the logical path he has followed is not much different from that of other China-civilization thinkers.  What follows, by contrast, is different, and the difference is expressed in the following ways.  First, even if the “ultra-social system” was created in the context of the “China problem,” nonetheless the “ultra-social system is not a ‘Chinese particularity,’” because “there is no society that does not possess an internal pluralism and an expansive view of the outside world,” and in this sense, “all societies are ultra-societies.”  In other words, Wang’s theory of the ultra-social system is not a “theory of Chinese uniqueness.” 

Second, Wang’s view of civilization is similar.  Concretely speaking, he internalizes the conflicts emphasized by those who talk about clashes between civilizations, seeing them as relations within civilizations, and consequently greatly complicates our view of civilizations, and at the same time interprets what people often see as the hard core of a “civilization” as being much more in flux, full of tensions and changes.  Wang interprets his “three circles” in just this manner.  Finally, from the perspective of the theories of the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) that Wang likes to cite, “the history of civilization is the history of the exchange and circulation of objects and accomplishments of different societies.”  He stresses that civilization is made up of “different combinations of shared agency and shared culture,” in which on the one hand “you contain my difference,” while on the other “I am in you and you are in me.”  For this reason, if we really want to “understand China” we must “transcend China.”  Moreover, “allowing mutual exchange to correct the civilizational self-infatuation of the state” is the “only path toward hope.”[76]

Wang Mingming’s argument concerning civilization and China is very scholarly, and we can identify three principle sources for his ideas and scholarship:  first, Western anthropological and sociological theory since the nineteenth century; second, research on China by scholars like Wu Wenzao, Fei Xiaotong, Maurice Friedman (1921-2012) and G. William Skinner (1925-2008); and third, fieldwork and theoretical reflection in which Wang and other Chinese anthropologists and ethnographers are engaged.  This background of theory, practice and reflection have led Wang to note that, compared to marginal academic fields like archeology, folklore studies, ethnography, and religious studies, the “thought world,” which finds itself “at the center of scholarly opinion,” pays little attention to the scholarly observation noted above concerning “the relativity of the definitions of center and periphery and the multiple possibilities of civilizations,” and instead remains “immersed in an imaginary of an internally unified ‘national culture.’” 

In the conclusion to an essay addressed to his academic colleagues, but which also serves as an introduction to some of the tianxia arguments discussed in this essay, Wang remarks that:  “the contemporary Chinese thought world is anxious to reconstruct its self-knowledge on the basis of a linear timeline.  The ‘Liberals,’ the ‘New Left,’ and the ‘New Confucians’ all divide things clearly into the national past, present, and future, so that their arguments will make logical sense.”  Consequently, no matter what their viewpoint, they all tend to “define ‘Chinese civilization’ as being a territory that is internally simplified and clearly different from the outside world.”  Wang clearly does not share this viewpoint.  Finally, he concludes his essay with the following sentence:  “Civilizational self-knowledge relies not solely on the tradition handed down by the ancestors, but also on those civilizations outside of civilization.” 

Part Seven

The above case-study style discussion of tianxia theories is woefully inadequate as a review of the literature, but if the point is to take the intellectual pulse of the issue and to get a sense of what it reveals about the concerns of the era, then it is fairly representative.  To be sure, these narratives of tianxia and China differ not only in terms of disciplinary background, style of argument, and literary style, but also in terms of their scholarly objectives, their engagement with practical matters, and their political standpoints (some indeed directly oppose one another on these points).  At the same time, they also share certain interests, concerns, and intellectual resources and accept certain premises, and even express similar attitudes.  The main reason for this is that these arguments emerge from the same period, and they express the intellectual and emotional excitement of the Chinese people living in this period.  This excitement, simply stated, is the excitement of achieving agency through self-understanding.  In epistemological terms, this effort is, in Zhao Tingyang’s words, that of “rethinking China.” 

The idea of “rethinking China” suggests that past understandings of China were suspect or even wrong, and that any self-understanding or agency built on the basis of such understandings is empty, and thus, the first step in establishing genuine self-agency is to clear away all erroneous or empty understandings, seeking out their intellectual origins and eliminating them.  In this process, many popular historical, social, political and legal theories came to be doubted, and the understandings or narratives of China constructed on the basis of those theories were criticized, their intellectual roots, which had been buried deep in history, exposed.  At the same time, some of the historical and theoretical links necessary to the achievement of genuine self-knowledge and agency were also established, the most outstanding of which is perhaps the attempt to establish a new agency with deep historical and civilizational content, achieved through a new understanding and affirmation of Chinese history, culture and civilization. 

This new agency has a unique aspect, a uniqueness that traces its origins to an ancient yet ever-new civilization.  From another perspective, the agent who is creating this civilization is also a “world historical nation” with “universalistic impulses” (Shi Zhan, as previously cited), destined to take up its historical mission and to play its role in participating in and even leading the process of the creation of a universal world order.  The rediscovery of the ancient tianxia worldview occurred in the course of this kind of intellectual movement, and attracted a great deal of attention, even becoming an identifying feature of the movement, which should not be hard to understand.  This is because, as an important concept in in the ancient Chinese thought world, the way in which the ancient Chinese people imagined a kind of universal moral-civilizational order, tianxia was understood as displaying an expansive heart and vision, a kind of political philosophy and practice that attracted people’s admiration.  Even more important, this concept, the basic genetic code of our civilization, survived the collapse of that civilization and endured to the present day, and in its particularity and its universality, manages to satisfy the needs of contemporary people in terms of the portrayal and imagination of the present and future of the Chinese people. 

Yet, looking back at history, even if we set aside the collapse of tianxia under the Qing, the anti-tradition whirlwind of the May Fourth, or even all of the political, intellectual and social movements of the Cultural Revolution, during the height of which the idea was to destroy anything old, it is enough to remember the “culture craze” of the 1980s, whose major concern was to criticize tradition and support modernization, its elegy to the “yellow civilization” and its praise for “blue civilization”[77] still ringing in our ears, today’s situation can only made people think that they are living in another world.  People naturally ask, how did this change come about?  What does this change ultimately mean?  Answering this question would require a number of articles and books, and given space considerations, this essay will only mention the following points in a simple manner.

Without any doubt, the most obvious and in many ways most important reason leading to this change are that changes created in China by the policy of reform and opening since the 1980s.  Especially since entering the new millennium, China has taken advantage of the great wave of globalization, and has rapidly become a part of the world economy, indeed becoming the world’s factory.  The continued rapid expansion of China’s economy not only produced a great deal of wealth in a short period of time, bringing about huge changes in the face of Chinese society, it also increased China’s overall national power, and changed China’s position in the world.  Given the outsized scale of China’s population and territory, its economic might and its position in the world division of labor, this change from the very outset had world significance.  China became the focus of world attention, and its influence on the world increased daily. 

Such a rapid and huge historical change inevitably was a shock to the soul, changing people’s received notions and concepts, motivating them to reimagine China, the world, and the relationship between them.  People started to explore the mystery of the “rise of great powers,”[78] to try to understand the secret of the “China miracle,” and even to discuss the “China model,”[79] a successful model of development which was, moreover, different from that of the West.  Along with this, the Chinese people’s sense of national pride and cultural self-confidence increased, and they began to re-evaluate and redefine themselves, to rethink the role China should play in the world, and to express their thoughts in different ways.

Occurring at the same time as this change and performing a complementary function were changes during this period in the worlds of knowledge and thought, both in terms of their means of production and dissemination and in terms of content.  Even if its impact outside of China is limited, and is hardly comparable in the context of the greater changes in China’s economy and society, these intellectual changes were nonetheless astonishing (惊人).  Those who felt this most deeply were those who had experienced the change from the Cultural Revolution to the post-Cultural Revolution periods.  In the language of the era, this generation of people experienced, in the realms of knowledge, thought, and spirit, a transformation from “imprisonment” to “liberation,” from “ten thousand horses standing silent 万马齐喑,” to “let a hundred flowers bloom”. 

As for the production and dissemination of knowledge, this transformation comports two complementary elements.  First, in the reforms launched in the 1970s, the effectiveness of these policies was mainly expressed in a return to a normal social life, in the course of which the people’s historical memory slowly rose to the surface, and many old things that had formerly been seen in a negative light began to return, consciously or unconsciously.  Even if this return was neither complete nor thorough, it nonetheless became an important basis for a more extensive cultural revival later on.  In comparison with this, the changes brought about by the policy of opening in the worlds of knowledge and thought were even more obvious.  Beginning in the 1980s, China welcomed the century’s second wave of “Western learning spreading to the East,” as the knowledge, thought, and methodologies of Western humanities and social sciences poured into China; there was a new round of enthusiasm for studying abroad, which has continued up to the present day.  For the Chinese people, who had just emerged from an intellectual and cultural desert, such changes were equally shocking, changing viewpoints, remolding souls, stimulating the production of new thought and new imaginative possibilities. 

On this point, we need not recount in detail the developments in knowledge and thought production and their mode of transmission in Chinese society since the 1980s, nor the historical phases of this development, and need only point out one thing, which is that this development was one part of China’s social and economic changes, reflecting the path traced by the changes, but were themselves also an important motive force behind the changes, pushing them forward and attempting to guide their direction.  Following [the discussion of] “the rise of great powers” and the gradual appearance of such internal and external effects, the resulting changes within China in terms of thought and academic life were also extremely visible.  As we have already seen, in the process of the vigorous competition for hegemony between different types of thought, the accumulation of rich and diverse knowledge, theories, perspectives, and research methods has already achieved a basic success.  Knowledge is used by thought, thought serves “politics,” and the production of knowledge, the reconstruction of academics, and the competition of ideas developed greatly in this process.

The third factor stimulating the thought transformation was the change in the ideology of the ruling party.  As everyone knows, the Chinese Communists established their party on the basis of what was originally the communist ideology of Europe and the Soviet Union.  With the establishment of the People’s Republic, despite a certain indigenization of this ideology, from the beginning it adopted a radical standpoint opposing traditional Chinese thought and values, a stance on which, in addition, the party based its historical legitimacy.  Over the course of more than half a century of revolution, movements, and social change, the principles and policies opposing traditional culture were broadly applied in all aspects of society, thus creating an unprecedented rupture with tradition and culture. 

With the end of the Cultural Revolution, following the shift in national strategy from class struggle to economic development, the former ideology that worshipped revolution inevitably changed as well.  In this process, the ruling party’s stance on traditional culture also gradually changed, from its early promises to restore popular culture, to later conscious efforts to use historical and cultural factors to promote local economic development and urban reconstruction, and their final push to integrate traditional culture into state cultural and political developmental strategies.  The hope on the domestic front was to bring the people together and strengthen national identity, and on the international front to resist and compete against Western knowledge, at the same time increasing China’s influence in the world.  Ultimately, the state’s embrace of traditional culture became an indispensable part of “the great revival of the Chinese people,” and the ruling party now continually sings the praises of traditional culture and elevates its position.[80]

As a consequence, traditional culture has been transformed from the vestige of “feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism,” as it had been labeled by the orthodox ideology, into a cultural and spiritual resource with positive significance, and in addition has moved from the margins to the center, entering the halls of power and receiving increasing respect.  It is not an exaggeration to say that the change in the ruling party’s ideology not only created the developmental space for movements like the “national learning craze” among academics and the people at large, but in fact also stimulated and guided the development of these movements.[81]  Moreover, even if to this point, this essay has not directly addressed the question of the ruling party’s movement to remake its ideology, the question is not a background issue outside of the scope of this essay, but is instead part of the topic, indeed a core part.  As revealed in the phenomena discussed in the introduction, this ideological reconstruction came with its own “tianxia argument,” and, compared with other such arguments, that of the ruling party is obviously carries more weight.  I will have more to say on the question of the ruling party’s efforts to rebuild its ideology and the relationship between this and tianxia arguments in the conclusion, but before launching this discussion, it would be helpful to offer a few more closely grained observations concerning the intellectual picture traced above.

Surveying contemporary tianxia theories and their intellectual background, people may feel a strong sense of historical and intellectual continuity.  In a normative sense, the classical notion of tianxia represented an idea of political legitimacy.  On the one hand, tianxia belongs to everyone, tianxia is the tianxia of the people of the world, not the property of a family or a lineage; on the other hand, he who received the heavenly mandate receives tianxia as well, and those who win the hearts of the people win tianxia.  The gain or loss of tianxia is thus decided by the direction of the people’s hearts, the ultimate source of the mandate of heaven.  In recent history, this ideology lost its persuasiveness with the dissolution of the imperial order, and what came to replace it was a complete set of modern political concepts imported from the West.  Even if this transformation from old to new did not, as already pointed out above,  completely change the deep structure of China’s ideology, nonetheless, for a relatively long period of time, the old ideology was, at least on the surface, thoroughly discredited, and withdrew from the stage of history. 

Yet, with the “rise of great powers” and the accompanying movements of ideological reconstruction and cultural revival, a number of traditional political concepts that had previously disappeared came to the surface once again, being absorbed into popular political, intellectual, and academic discourses.  Subsequently, all sorts of “popular welfare 民生” issues came to be situated among the political issues most in the public eye, as we seen in slogans such “thoroughly develop a moderately prosperous society 全面建设小康社会,”  followed by that of bringing into being a “harmonious society 和谐社会” “based on the people 以人为本,” which was presented as one of the nation’s chief strategic goals.  From another angle, slogans such as “building the Party for all, governing for the people 立党为公，执政为民,” redolent with populism, circulated widely, becoming the standard way in which the ruling party defined itself. 

At the same time, certain scholars began referring to the mechanism of the transmission of high level political power as a “dynastic transition,” and defined the “historical mission 历史使命” of the ruling party as “heaven’s will 天意,” or the “mandate of heaven.”[82]  Of course, as under the dynasties, this kind of pronouncement aimed at strengthening regime legitimacy is in fact a double-edged sword, because it contains a critical dimension.  For example, people can say that those who betray their public charge to enrich themselves 背公求私 “are not protecting the people and thus abandoning ‘the mandate of heaven.’”  The question is:  What should be considered “protecting the people?”  For one of the scholars mentioned above, his criticism, based on the idea of “making tianxia public 公天下,” led him to demand a democratic republic.  Following a similar logic might well lead to a familiar proposal concerning “universal values.”  Yet in the minds of another group of scholars, the tianxia idea has been placed in the context of contemporary international relations, becoming a critical tool in the debates over the nation-state and imperialism.

The traditional tianxia viewpoint emphasized the notion of difference between interior and exterior, and this remains a central concern of contemporary tianxia arguments, although, because of differences in standpoint and focus, some tianxia theorists tend to emphasize the “outer,” and use tianxia ideas to imagine a rational world order; while others focus on the “inner,” and use tianxia concepts to explain the principles of order in China, both classical and modern.  But this difference based on research methods has only limited significance, as research on the world order can also contain thoughts about internal order, and arguments about internal order can be reflections of thoughts about the external order. 

What is important is that even if the world imagined by traditional tianxia theory distinguishes between internal and external, it is nonetheless based on principles of order that apply to both, in such a way that only by controlling the exterior from the center 以中驭外 can one “cultivate patterns and virtues to attract them 修文德以来之.”[83]  The core question here is:  What is the universally effective form of good government?  On this question, tianxia theorists have different views, some advocating socialism, others stressing true Confucianism, others upholding liberalism, most finally picking and choosing to suit their own purposes.  Some argue for the agency of the Chinese civilization at the core of Confucianism, bitterly criticizing the fake hegemony of Western discourse propagated by false universal values;[84]  others advocate opening the mind and absorbing the currents of the world 吸纳百川, integrating and inheriting “mainstream civilization” only to transcend it later on; some thinkers, taking the ancient tribute system as their model, have designed a  contemporary “new tribute system 新五服制” with China at the center;[85] others still propose “building a new world civilization for all mankind, with China as the base and Chinese civilization as the axis.”[86]  But regardless of the path they choose, their precise point of emphasis, or their choice of “ism,” all of these theories take the tianxia concept as the crystallization of the wisdom of Chinese civilization.  It binds together notions of tolerance, compassion, and public concern, serving both as the magic formula for overcoming narrow-spirited nationalism, as well as a guide to the achievement of the historical mission of the Chinese nation. 

Looking back at the late Qing-early Republican period, when the Chinese people abandoned tianxia like a worn-out shoe, and comparing this to the “imperial favor 荣宠” with which tianxia is regarded today, can one remain unmoved? Yet from a historical standpoint, this kind of change is neither rare nor hard to understand.  From the beginning, tianxia had both a broad and a narrow meaning, and whether it was open, progressive, and expansive, or closed, conservative and inward looking, it was tied to national trends and decided by national power.  In the Qing period, the country was in trouble and national power was in decline, and the nation-state failed to take form, and as a result, in the minds of people at the time, tianxia ideas were not only useless but harmful.  Today, China’s fate has completely turned around, and the strength of a “rising great power” cannot be stopped.  As One Belt-One Road links Europe and Asia, the outlines of the former tianxia begin to be visible once again.[87] 

At such a moment, people suddenly discover that the framework of the nation-state cannot contain the civilization that is China, and that the only concept capable of expressing the perspective and the mission of this axial civilization is tianxia.  This may also prove that tianxia is destined to be an inherent characteristic of Chinese civilization, and that the memory of tianxia was never really all that far from “us.”

Part Eight

That said, people must also admit that China’s modern plight has its own special characteristics, and the disappearance and re-emergence of tianxia is not a simple return to the old dynastic cycle.  The basic difference between today and the past is that the challenge faced by modern China, in Gu Yanwu’s 顾炎武 (1613-1682)[88] words, was not a simple “loss of a country” but instead the “loss of a worldview (tianxia).”  And in fact, the traditional idea of tianxia did indeed disappear, its eclipse being brought about not only by the “barbarians” but also by “the sons and grandsons of the emperors 炎黄子孙.”  From Qing times onward, people abandoned tianxia in favor of the nation-state, sought after wealth and power and looked down on benevolence and virtue.  Later on, Western knowledge became the standard, which led to a full-scale rejection of tradition, in which the old rites and teachings, the old culture and arts, the old institutions, customs, habits, and thought, were all viewed as enemies that had to be dispensed with if China were to thrive, which prompted a century of self-denial in the form of the “interrogating China” movement, (to borrow Zhao Tingyang’s formulation once again).  All of this, in the eyes of today’s tianxia theorists, is an expression of how Chinese lost themselves and their sense of agency. 

Consequently, the most pressing, the most important mission before the Chinese thought world is that of returning to self and establishing a Chinese agency.  The first demand of this mission, as mentioned above, is to return to Chinese history and to understand China anew from within this history.  This in turn means that we will have to find new ways to tell Chinese history, providing new historical narratives, and on this basis create new connections between the past and the present.  This is because existing China narratives are exclusively products of the “interrogating China” movement.  To carry this out, we need a thorough review of the historical roots and the theoretical underpinnings of this movement.  This time, the critical gaze will naturally focus on the various Western theories that entered China in modern times, among which the first to be attacked is the system of Enlightenment Thought established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  This is because the self-understanding of the Chinese people has been constructed on the basis of these theories and this knowledge.  And here, a difficult question to avoid is:  What to do with the standard official historical narrative of orthodox communist ideology?

The Enlightenment rationality that entered modern China and guided the “interrogate China” movement was not expressed solely as liberalism, but also in the originally European communism that entered China via the Soviet Union.  Although today many people see communism as an ideology completely different from liberalism, from the perspective of Chinese culture, their common features in terms of history, cultural and theoretical preconditions are clearly more outstanding.  What is most important is that over the course of the past century or so, the strongest force demanding that China be “interrogated” was the communist movement that developed in China itself.  To put it simply, through the establishment of materialism as scientific truth, and the application of the five-stage theory of the laws of historical development to China, the CCP provided a comprehensive historical narrative for China, which also answered basic questions of self-identity such as “What is China?” “Who are we?” “Where did we come from?” and “Where are we going?” 

The problem is that in this type of true and universal historical narrative, tradition and the present are divided and antagonistic, with tradition representing the backwardness, oppression, exploitation, and corruption associated with the feudal model, something that must be completely eradicated and buried.  Some people believe that the adoption of this new view of history allowed the CCP to occupy the “ideological commanding heights” in its struggle to wrest tianxia from the Nationalists.  In fact, in both the pre-1949 and the post-1949 eras, the Marxist view of history was at the core of CCP ideology, and served as the source of legitimacy for its political rule.  But in the post-Cultural Revolution period, China began to enter into the world order, and as Chinese society became increasingly secular and pluralistic in the process of opening and marketization, the formerly convincing orthodox ideology lost its power to explain the past and the present, becoming a rigid thought system criticized by those required to learn it in school, and mocked by people in general. 

This ideological crisis had a double outcome.  On the one hand, it created an ideological vacuum in Chinese society, sapping people’s morale, meaning that another struggle between different schools of thought to seize the “commanding ideological heights” once again became inevitable; on the other hand, this situation, including the inevitable struggle, directly called into question the legitimacy of the CCP as the sole ruling power, which required an appropriate response.  The CCP’s modification of its view of traditional culture, and its active efforts to absorb ideas, concepts and values rooted in Chinese traditional culture into its ideological system, all occurred against this backdrop.  As to the concrete form the CCP’s ideological change took on, several examples were mentioned above, but these are insufficient to express the true nature of the changes, which I will enumerate here. 

The CCP’s promotion of developmental concepts like “a moderately prosperous society,” “ruling the country through virtue 以德治国,” “putting the people first,” and “harmonious society,” as well as its emphasis on principles like “building the Party for all, governing for the people,” obviously draw on the intellectual resources of traditional Chinese culture.  This trend became even clearer beginning in 2012, expanding in both speed and scope after Xi Jinping assumed the position of CCP General Secretary.  As the highest Party leader, Xi Jinping himself made frequent references to the ancient classics in settings within and outside the Party, in China and abroad, striving to incorporate traditional Chinese ideas and concepts concerning politics, law, society, and personal cultivation into contemporary social life and CCP concepts of governance.[89]  In complementary fashion, a newly edited selection of traditional texts, entitled Quotations from the Four Books and Five Classics:  A Reader for Party and State Cadres 四书五经语录：党政干部诵读本 (Beijing, 2013) was published in huge print runs, winding up on the desks of tens of millions of Party and state cadres. 

But what most captured people’s attention was Xi Jinping’s promotion, as soon as he took up his post, of the “China Dream”[90] that was to achieve “two century-long goals” in terms of national development, the core of which was to “carry out the great revival of the Chinese nation.”  Some people argue that the “two centuries” concept constitutes a new historical narrative, and that the core dream of “carrying out the great revival of the Chinese nation” [91] “appeals to all those for whom the revival of the nation stirs their feelings, including those in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao as well as Overseas Chinese.”[92]  Yet we should note that this new historical narrative does not invalidate or replace the older one, but rather transforms and incorporates it.  In the new historical narrative, the previously diametrically opposed past and future are reconciled and unified in a single body, and the ruling party that at the outset adopted foreign theories has removed its make-up, recognized its ancestors and returned to the fold. 

As a result, the CCP not only represents the entire body of the contemporary Chinese people, but also leads a people whose great civilization “occupies a leading role 担纲者” (to use the language of the tianxia theorists) in achieving its historical and civilizational mission.  In this perspective, the CCP marries its historical legitimacy to the long history of Chinese civilization.  On this point, the best evidence comes from the words of the CCP’s highest leader.

In a speech to the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium on April 1, 2014, Xi Jinping explained to his audience “what kind of country China is.”  His explanation began with history, because “history is the source of the present, any country’s today came from their yesterday.  Only by understanding where a country is from can one see why today this country is like this and not like that, and why in the future that country will take this path and not that path.”  In Xi Jinping’s explanation, China’s outstanding special features include:  first, “it is a country with an ancient civilization,” Chinese civilization being the only one among the world’s ancient civilizations to have continued down to the present day without a rupture.  China’s spiritual world is unique and ancient, and the Chinese people’s view of the world, or society and of human life possesses its own unique value system. 

Next, “China is a country that has experienced deep suffering.”  China was for a long period a world leader, but in modern times fell from prosperity into decline, and was a victim of the great powers’ invasions and bondage, becoming a half-colonial, half-feudal society.  Through more than a century of unrelenting struggle, the Chinese people finally grasped their own destiny.  Third, China is a country that practices socialism with Chinese characteristics.  Since the beginning of the modern era, the Chinese people have “painfully sought out a path consistent with her national characteristics.” She tried a variety of systems including the parliamentary system, the multi-party system, and the presidential system, all of which failed.  “Finally, China chose the socialist path.  China’s unique cultural tradition, her unique historical destiny, and her unique national characteristics, all meant that China would necessarily follow a developmental path consistent with her own unique features.”  “In sum,” says Xi Jinping in his conclusion, “to observe and understand China, one must look at both history and the present, both the material and the spiritual.  The five thousand-year history of the civilization of the Chinese nation, the Chinese people’s 170 year history of struggle in the modern era, the Chinese Communist Party’s 90 plus year history of struggle, the People’s Republic of China’s 60 plus year history of development, and reform and opening’s 30 year history of exploration, all of these histories are of a piece, and cannot be split asunder.  If one ignores Chinese history, Chinese culture, the spiritual world of the Chinese people and the profound changes that have occurred in contemporary China, then it is difficult to accurately understand China.”

The particularity of this historical narrative, like the ones we noted in the context of tianxia theories, it that is not only stresses the importance of history, but also emphasizes its uniqueness.  Yet if we stop here, this historical narrative cannot be considered a tianxia theory, and perhaps is not even a China narrative consistent with the needs of the age.  This is because tianxia is universal, and the uniqueness of a China with the vision and ambition of tianxia must also include universality.  When Kang Youwei advocated dispensing with national boundaries in search of great harmony he did this with the idea of saving China, because China was “a symbol and a vehicle for a kind of culture”[93] that carried forward the ideal of great harmony.  Later on, other scholars pushed this idea further, some people seeing the “center” of the “central kingdom” as the “direct manifestation and interpretation of the national soul of a cultural nation,” just as they understood “being Chinese” as bringing heaven and earth, higher and lower together, “so that the individual may stand tall between heaven and earth, dauntlessly becoming a true person.”[94]  Others emphasize the quality of openness, including the integration of the other— “change others through oneself and eventually changing the other into oneself”—as the elemental “nature of the Chinese spirit.”[95] 

Similarly, in current CCP discourse, the emphasis on the uniqueness of China’s history, culture and national spirit is not another option outside of universality, but rather quite the opposite—it is precisely because the roots of the uniqueness of the national character are found in a unique history and culture that this universality is worthy of preserving and developing.  The uniqueness of what are called “Chinese wisdom and the Chinese solution” are considered to be useful in “solving the problems of humanity,”[96] and the roots of China’s thought and culture are here.  In other words, if we want to explain and preserve this universality rooted in uniqueness, it is particularly important to establish links between the present and the past. 

On this point, Jiang Shigong’s recently published long essay in Philosophy and History on “Interpreting the Xi Jinping Era” through the Report to the Nineteenth National CCP Congress can be seen as a good illustration.[97]  In the narrative developed in Jiang’s essay, philosophy and history can be understood as symbols of universality and particularity, and the blending and fusion of the two can also explain how the Report to the Nineteenth National CCP Congress produced the “Xi Jinping era,” and how the practice of the sinicization of Marxism was the key to activating the Chinese cultural spirit.  Jiang’s text argues that “This great report to the Nineteenth Party Congress was written in such a way as to integrate philosophy and history, and thus to link universal philosophic reflections with concrete historical practice.” 

For example, “the report presented at the Nineteenth Party Congress no longer employs the natural time of generational politics to construct the history of the CCP, but instead approaches the question from the perspective of historical mission, and opens a new political space on the basis of a specially determined political time period, dividing the history of the CCP into the three stages of ‘standing up’, ‘getting rich’, and ‘becoming strong.”  This is “a narrative style that combines classics and history, or that uses history to explain the classics.”  In such a manner, the particular political expression of a contemporary political party is wreathed in a deeply meaningful cultural significance. 

Jiang’s text further points out that Chinese civilizational history makes no division between this world and paradise, the two being “absorbed in a complete world where heaven and mankind are one.”  The life of the Chinese people must be realized within a “historically existing ‘family-state universe 家国天下,” where they can “locate a universal, lasting meaning.”  For this reason, history writing in China is not a simple matter of factual notation, but instead “a philosophical search for universal values and meaning in the factual record.”  Complementing this cultural spirit is “a universal tianxia order,” whose institutional realization produced the tribute system, which constituted a “universal system of diversity within unity.”  Precisely because of its unique civilizational nature, “China’s rise” accomplished a unique kind of “Chinese exceptionalism.”  Unlike Western culture, which “consistently attempts to arrive at the resolution of any antagonism in favor of one of the original positions,” Chinese culture “culture consistently seeks to find the unity within the antagonism, which results in a pluralism based on ideas of harmony.” 

For this reason, the importance of the “China solution” is that it is anchored in Chinese civilization and, by absorbing the strong points of civilizations throughout the world, it “promotes the modern transformation of Chinese civilization and tradition, ultimately creating a new order for human civilization that both transcends and absorbs Western civilization.”  Hence we have what the “Xi Jinping era” calls “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” which “not only ushers in a new era for China, but also opens a new era in world history.”[98]

There are many similar passages in Jiang’s text, such as the “five basic principles of peaceful coexistence” that New China supposedly upholds, or the notion in Chinese traditional culture that “the righteous king does not seek to rule people beyond the reach of law and civilization 王者不治化外之民,” which is of a piece.  Xi Jinping’s notion of constructing a new order of international governance through “shared growth through discussion and collaboration 共商共建共用” similarly traces its origins to “‘the world belongs to all’ thought from Chinese traditional culture, as well as to notions of harmony as expressed in the saying ‘harmony without uniformity,’” embodied in “the contribution of Chinese wisdom to all mankind.”  Similarly, the fact that in his speech, Xi Jinping chose expressions like “Chinese wisdom” and the “Chinese solution” instead of the more popular “China model,” is also understood as an expression of the genuine tianxia-ism found in Chinese wisdom.  For this reason, the great revival of the Chinese nation “is not nationalistic, but cosmopolitan.”  “One root of this cosmopolitan spirit is in the Confucian universalistic tradition, as we see when the report to the Nineteenth Party Congress invokes the notion of ‘when the Way prevails, tianxia is shared by all’ 大道之行，天下为公; another root is the communist belief in the liberation of all of humanity.”

As in his arguments concerning Hong Kong, Jiang Shigong seeks to provide a Chinese cultural explanation for Communist theory and practice.  In his view, “the CCP is consistently grounded in this great native land, and its political nature, at base, is its indigenous, national nature, its authentic Chinese nature, rather than in the Party’s class nature.”  In discussing the CCP’s philosophy of struggle, he says “The fighting character of the CCP traces its origins not only to the spirit of mastery in Marxism, but even more to the Chinese cultural spirit, as reflected in sayings like ‘all are responsible for the rise and fall of the universe’ 天下兴亡，匹夫有责, and ‘the superior man tirelessly perfects himself’ 君子自强不息.”  Even the CCP’s understanding of the meaning of communism “is no longer in humanity’s Garden of Eden, ‘unalienated’ by the division of labor within society. Instead it is intimately linked to the ideal of ‘great unity under Heaven’ 天下大同 from the Chinese cultural tradition.” 

These arguments from Jiang’s text clearly diverge from orthodox ideology, but they are in accord with the general direction of the ideological transformation of the CCP in the post-Cultural Revolution era.  In Jiang’s text, this transformation is based on his reading of the trends leading to an ideological decline resulting from related social changes, and it was precisely “Chinese culture that infused the idea of ‘communism’ with new spiritual capacity,” and “the brilliant political imagination of thousands of years of Chinese civilization that successfully filled the spiritual vacuum left by the weakening of the Communist vision.”  Here, it is more appropriate to read Jiang’s text as if it were written in the imperative voice.  This is because “Chinese culture” is really not the natural spiritual resource for communism, and even less can “the brilliant political imagination of thousands of years of Chinese civilization fill the spiritual vacuum left by the weakening of the Communist vision.”  To establish the kind of link between the two that Jiang proposes in his essay would first require a new political imagination.  There is no doubt that the “Chinese cultural reading” of a sinicized Marxism offered by Jiang’s text is a part of this new political imagination.  And the new political imagination itself can be seen as a new construction of tianxia-ism.[99]  
 
Part Nine

​Seeing the reconstruction of the ruling party’s ideology as the construction of  new tianxia-ism, and observing it against the larger panorama of contemporary Chinese intellectual and academic life, might grant us a clearer perspective on intellectual trends in today’s China.  From this clearer perspective, what is perhaps most noteworthy are two inter-related questions:  first, the relationship between tianxia-ism as an official ideology and other tianxia theories; and second, the relationship between tianxia theories and ideology itself.

As to the first question, the most visible point is the dominant position of official ideology.  This position of dominance is based in national power, achieved through the institutional control exercised in the fields of education, thought, culture, academics and mass media.  In fact, regardless of the reason, in a system that not only emphasizes the importance of ideology, but also pays attention to the control of thought, information, and speech, in the absence of the changes in national ideology discussed above, and the various gestures, growing out of this change, through which the state demonstrated its goodwill toward “traditional culture,” the revival of traditional culture that people are witnessing today, as well as the competing tianxia theories that are a symbol of this revival, would have been completely unthinkable. 

For similar reasons, official ideology is capable of and in fact constantly attempts to increase its influence on society.  However, this does not mean that state ideology can penetrate society as a whole and win over the people’s hearts and minds, especially in the intellectual and cultural worlds.  Quite the contrary, if we examine conditions within the intellectual world we immediately discover that, even if it is a question of the same historical and cultural changes, the relationship between official ideology and the other tianxia theories is far more complicated.  This complexity takes two basic forms.

From a somewhat superficial level, people can understand this relationship by noting the theorist’s political standpoint and arguments.  In simple terms, on one pole of this relationship, the theorist develops his arguments on the basis of a complete affirmation of the current system and its history, with an eye toward providing more convincing proofs of its historical and theoretical legitimacy.  These kinds of proofs can be expressed in a straightforward and simple manner, or can take the form of complicated and mysterious intellectual explanations.  Some focus on domestic issues, seeking to unearth the theoretical significance of contemporary political practice, while others range widely in time, situating the ruling party’s legitimacy within the lengthier and deeper foundation of Chinese civilization.  Some look abroad, and through a fresh understanding and criticism of Western political institutions and principles, provide intellectual and theoretical support for a “Chinese path” that rejects Western values. 

At the other pole, however, the emphasis on Chinese history and culture and the esteem for Chinese civilization leads in different directions.  For reasons that can be understood, these kinds of arguments always avoid direct confrontations with official ideology, which means that they have a hard time achieving the comprehensiveness or thoroughness that they should.  Despite this, the key points they raise and their basic arguments are not hard to discern.  In sum, these arguments do not identify (or do not completely identify) with the proposals of official ideology, even as they consciously make use of the opportunities presented by changes in official ideology to advance their political arguments concerning China and tianxia.[100] 

In this process, some of these thinkers adopt a friendly posture toward the policies and trends of the current system, either completely affirming these ideological changes or trying hard to find common ground between their views and those of the regime, or seeing the current system as a necessary phase in the achievement of their goal and accepting it for that reason.[101]  In addition, platforms and media within the world of thought and culture are always “advancing with the times,” and choosing topics that best reflect new ideological trends and possess a certain intellectual or academic relevance is a way of advancing the discussion.[102]  This kind of approach can be seen as occupying the middle ground between of the two ends of the spectrum discussed above.

From another perspective, the relationship between official ideology and tianxia theory is even more complicated and subtle.  First, as already noted, what the rise of tianxia theory reflected was in fact a kind of profound crisis of self-identity, or an anxiety about agency, and the origin of this crisis can be traced to the Chinese and Western clash of civilizations in modern times, although the more recent causes are the immense changes Chinese society has experienced in the post-Cultural Revolution era.  Yet different people interpret the meaning of this crisis differently.  For the ruling party, the crisis is defined by the ever increasing decline in orthodox ideology, which demands that they immediately shore up and update the ideology, the only way they can regain the people’s hearts and minds and reinforce their legitimacy on the domestic front, and affirm their great power status on the world stage.  But for another set of people, the century-long crisis has never really been ended, and if we want to find ourselves and establish a Chinese agency, we have to start from scratch and accept other traditions.  This means that all ideas and theories, including Communist ideology, are the objects of reflection and criticism.

Next, as a discourse, and regardless of its concrete proposals, tianxia-isms all make use of certain intellectual ingredients, for example they all emphasize the importance of history in the spiritual life of the Chinese, they all view establishing Chinese self-identity within history as the proper approach, they all emphasize concepts related to civilization, they all stress China’s special characteristics as an axial civilization, they all view China as the carrier of Chinese civilization, they all emphasize the continuity of China’s history and civilization and understand today’s China in this light, they all see tianxia-ism as a spiritual feature of Chinese civilization, and believe that this spiritual feature still exists, and moreover is an irreplaceable spiritual resource that will overcome many great problems of the contemporary world and solve humanity’s problems.

To be sure, the meanings of these intellectual ingredients are not the same in all of the theories, nor are they accorded the same weight.  They are put together differently and point in different directions, but objectively speaking, the theories mutually support one another because they all stress the importance of the discourse of tianxia-ism.  Moreover, even if the arguments developed around the theme of understanding China point in different directions, still, the theories they deploy are not completely different but instead overlap considerably.  For example, using theories of postmodernism, postcolonialism, or Orientalism to call into question or subvert Enlightenment reason can in fact satisfy any number of political demands.  Revealing the hypocrisy of universal Western values does the same thing.  And it of course goes without saying that all sorts of people and proposals can fall under the banner and intellectual movement of “rethinking China.”  This kind of theoretical overlap and multiplicity of meanings makes the relationship among tianxia theorists all the more complex.

But do all tianxia theorists agree on the question of their relationship to ideology?  To this point, when discussing ideology in this essay I have basically used the standard definition, generally identifying it with official ideology, and taking this situation as normal, and have not gone into detail about the nature and characteristics of ideology itself or the conditions that give rise to it.  Yet if we want to answer this question, it is not enough to stop at the habitual meaning of ideology, and we must instead analyze a certain number of related questions.  To stay close to the main topic of the essay and avoid needless detail, I will limit my discussion of these related issues to the work of two scholars.

In his recently published The Revival of Chinese Civilization 中国文明的复兴 (Beijing, 2018), the political scientist Zheng Yongnian 郑永年 (b. 1962)[103] offers a concentrated if concise discussion of questions concerning ideological construction, discourse-system building, cultural innovation, and civilizational development in the course of China’s transition.  He divides ideology into two parts—state and society—and argues that today’s China urgently needs to construct a “state ideology.”  The new ideology should be able to “objectively reflect the openness, inclusiveness, and progressiveness of all realms of Chinese practice,” transcending all (ideological) arguments on the left and the right, building domestic consensus and at the same time seeking out and integrating common values so as to be acknowledged internationally.  

In his essays on tianxia, another scholar, Ci Jiwei 慈继伟 (b. 1955) of the University of Hong Kong, cites the viewpoints of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Louis Althusser (1918-1990) and others in his analysis of the character of ideology and the conditions that nourish it.[104]  In his view, the tianxia idea belongs to Gramsci’s category of (cultural) hegemony, and he argues that both past and present tianxia theories are all ideological.  However, “hegemony” is different from naked “domination,” even in the case of state-directed ideology, because to effectively develop its ideological function, it cannot be directly expressed as political power.  He introduces the difference established by the French Marxist philosopher Althusser between a repressive state apparatus and an ideological state apparatus, noting particularly that Althusser saw the first as the product of a centralized body controlled by a single center, whereas the second possesses a relatively independent plural material existence, in which “freedom” is seen as the necessary condition to the establishment of “hegemony” qua ideology. 

In the context of the argument of my essay, this “freedom” is “the relative autonomy of cultural China in its relationship to political China, while ideology is the manner in which this cultural China can operate in the space it created.”  From this perspective, the ideological crisis faced by the CCP today is not whether they can renew or strengthen their ideology, but whether they can, outside of the “repressive state apparatus,” create the conditions to encourage the birth of an “ideological state apparatus,” or to put it simply, can they produce an “ideology.” 

Following these ideas, we can note the following two points in our observation of the various tianxia theorists attempting to build ideologies in contemporary China.

The first is the position and function of power in these efforts.  Based on the above definitions of ideology, even in a discussion of “state ideology” we cannot assume that the state can build an ideology (regardless of whether it is good or bad) simply by relying on its political power, nor can the state do it alone.  On the contrary, an ideology can only develop under conditions of relative autonomy and freedom, which requires the full participation of society, and an ideology produced in this way must necessarily be plural.  This means that, from the perspective of the state, politics and culture must be viewed separately and the state must respect the autonomy of the cultural realm.  To function in such a manner, the state must first possess a high degree of political self-confidence.[105] 

From the perspective of society, all of those participating in ideology-building must also “be liberated from political power,”[106] which means extricating themselves from a debate on political power that completely defends or completely opposes the present system, and focus instead on reason and scholarship, and through various independent efforts at knowledge-construction and theoretical practice, demonstrate and protect the dignity of thought and the autonomy of knowledge.  This should be the first principle of an “ethics of epistemology.”[107]  And from this we can deduce another point that is worthy of note, which is the importance of reason, argument and persuasion in the process of ideological construction, as well as the persuasiveness and credibility of the ideological proposals emerging from such a construction.

For any ideology to function effectively, it must be persuasive, believable not only to adherents but also to the people one is hoping to influence.  For this reason, any ideological proposition must be constructed on the basis of arguments that will be broadly accepted.  Such a requirement is particularly important in the context of the universalistic nature of the proposals put forward by tianxia theorists.  In his critical essay on tianxia, Professor Ci Jiwei points out that whether in the past or in the present, and regardless of the name that is used (be it tianxia in ancient times or today’s liberal world order), what people call universality are only their propositions and pronouncements concerning universality, and not universality itself.  And what prompts people to believe and accept this or that universal proposal is absolutely not coercive power, but instead plausibility.  The existence and extent of plausibility are crucial. 

To cite Ci’s essay:  “In today’s world, people only pay attention to and truly believe propositions based on those with strength 实力者.  Yet precisely for this reason, the person making the proposal must meet the even higher standard of persuading people through reason.”[108]  This is undoubtedly the challenge facing all tianxia theorists, be they official or among the people.  Yet under the conditions of contemporary Chinese thought and institutions, successfully meeting this challenge is not easy.  On the one hand, the ruling party is painfully aware of the danger of a mistaken ideology, and is working hard to integrate and absorb intellectual and cultural resources from traditional China to broaden the foundation of and enrich, renew, and strengthen the existing ideology.  Such a change is not without meaning or outcome, but in relying on their habitual practices of using state power to influence public opinion and suppressing dissenting views they turn culture into politics, render reason meaningless, and hence weaken or even destroy the “ideological state apparatus” whose existence is extremely important. 

On the other hand, in the face of this change, the response from the intellectual, academic, and knowledge communities is increasingly divided.  Some people respond to the call, providing conceptual and theoretical explanations, amplifying the state’s arguments; others simply follow along, beating the drum for the “rise of a great power;” some defend or even take advantage of the change, hoping to advance their own fortunes—or defeat an adversary—by jumping on board; still others engage the claims directly, striving for the power to interpret history and culture.  Against such a backdrop it has become problematic for the various tianxia theories to seem thoughtful, well-reasoned, and persuasive.

As noted above, this essay has no intention of providing a close reading of every tianxia theory, nor do I want to give an exhaustive list of related readings, but instead aim to provide an overview of this still unfolding movement, seeking out its origins, describing its features, understanding where it has come from and why, adding a bit of analysis.  By way of conclusion, there is only one point I hope to make, which is that regardless how the various tianxia theories were created, and regardless of the depth or superficiality of their reflections, to a great extent, the issues behind their projects are genuine, because it is not difficult to understand where these issues came from and the collective anxieties they have produced.  China, having gone through vast changes and having risen in the world, suddenly finds itself in unknown territory, perplexed by a series of questions.  Looking back at history, it is not difficult to see that the spiritual root of this anxiety lies in a confusion over self-identity, and that this is merely the continuation of the “holistic crisis 整体性的危机” of Chinese civilization beginning in the late Qing, a manifestation of this deep crisis in the particular circumstances of this moment. 

​At this important point in history, returning to history and rediscovering culture in search of self can be seen as a reasonable choice following the inner drive of civilization, while beginning from theoretical reflection, seeking a new understanding of China, establishing a new sense of agency, also possesses an inevitable necessity.  Nonetheless, this project is huge, very complicated and difficult.  Its requires participation from all sides, top-down as well as bottom-up efforts, and will only succeed after a long period of research and reflection.  In this process, the role of intellectuals 知识人 is irreplaceable, as they are the ones who construct theories and ideologies, as well as those who criticize this or that ideology.  But whatever role they play, and regardless of their viewpoint, as intellectuals, the first thing they should strive for is to maintain their professionalism, cling to truth, and devote themselves to reason.  They should not ignore their conscience or indulge their private interests, doing their utmost to avoid giving into prejudice or the emotion of the moment, and hence respect the tradition and norms of knowledge and sincerely develop their viewpoints.  This is because true ideological construction must maintain a certain distance from political power, and truly critical thought must maintain a clear-headed and critical consciousness in the face of any ideology. Only when they can do this will their proposals and explanations develop the power to persuade.


Notes
​
[1] 梁治平, “想象’天下’：当代中国的意识形态建构,” 思想 36 (Dec. 2018):  71-177.

[2] Translator’s note:  Some of Liang’s work, particularly that published early in his career, is available in English translation.  See for example “Explicating ‘Law:’ A Comparative Perspective of Chinese and Western Legal Culture.” Journal of Chinese Law 3 (1989); 55-92; and “Tradition and Change:  Law and Order in a Pluralist Landscape,” Cultural Dynamics 11.2 (1999):  215-236.  More recent representative publications in Chinese include:  礼教与法律 : 法律移植时代的文化冲突, (桂林：广西师范大学出版社, 2015); and 法辨 : 法律文化论集, (桂林：广西师范大学出版社, 2015).

[3] Many if not most articles published in Sixiang wind up available on the Internet in China in one form or another.  As of mid-February 2020, I could not yet locate Liang’s text online, although the issue of Sixiang in which Liang’s text appears seems to be for sale on douban and other articles on tianxia are available on Liang’s Aisixiang page.

[4] Translator’s note:  The “investiture of the gods” refers to a moment in the story of the transition between the Shang dynasty, the final ruler of which was an evil tyrant, and the Zhou dynasty, whose triumph represented the power of virtue to overcome depravity, a founding myth of Confucian Chinese civilization.  The event was celebrated in the sixteenth-century novel Fengshan yanyi 封神演义, and characters associated with the myth (and the novel) remain popular, among other things, in Chinese and Japanese video games.

[5] 刘向，五经通义.

[6] See https://tv.sohu.com/v/dXMvMjk0Njg3MTMyLzk4MjI4NDA4LnNodG1s.html and http://video.sina.com.cn/p/news/c/doc/2018-02=23/124168036119.html .

[7] 葛兆光，”纳’四裔’如’中华’？1920－1930年代中国学界有关’中国’与’中华民族’的论述,”思想 27 (2014).

[8] Translator’s note:  The author is referring to a tradition of activist Confucian scholarship, extending from Gong Zizhen, through Wei Yuan and culminating in Kang Youwei, which advocated reform based on a utopian reading of certain classical texts in which Confucius appears as a forward-looking king.

[9] 汪晖，中国现代思想的兴起, (Beijing 2004), vol, 1, part 2, ch. 5.

[10] 孙中山，三民主义 (Beijing:  2011), p. 67.

[11] Translator’s note:  Translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/poems/poems16.htm . 

[12] Translator’s note:  “National Learning,” a term recycled from the early twentieth century, refers to a wide variety of academic and intellectual efforts to encourage study of China’s intellectual and cultural traditions, particularly in ways that call into question universalistic approaches or academic disciplines identified as part of the Enlightenment heritage.  For more information, see the China Perspectives special issue devoted to the topic, available online here:  https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/5366 .

[13] Translator’s note:  Zhao Tingyang is a professor in the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Zhao’s basic ideas are available in English.  See “Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept ‘All-under-Heaven’ (Tian-xia),” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture Volume 12.1 (2006):  29-41; and “A Political World Philosophy in terms of All-under-heaven (Tian-xia),” Diogenese 221 (2009) 5-18.  For an excellent discussion of Zhao’s theory, see William A. Callahan, “Chinese Visions of the World Order:  Post-Hegemonic or New Hegemony,” International Studies Review 10.4 (2008):  749-761.

[14] 柯岚安，“中国视野下世界秩序：天下，帝国和世界,” in Zhao’s Tianxia System, p. 130.

[15] Translator’s note:  the “outer king” is meant to be contrasted with the “inner sage 内圣,”and Jiang’s argument, like that of other Gongyang scholars, is that Confucian scholarship, properly understood and properly practiced, must take the form of active political engagement.

[16] Translator’s note:  Sheng Hong is a liberal economist with Confucian leanings, and was Executive Director of the recently shuttered Unirule Institute 天则经济研究所, a liberal think tank set up in Beijing in 1993.  Representative writings of Shen include:  “宪政结构中的谏议制度及其现代意义,” 天府新论 2015. 3: 41-52; “天下文明——论儒家的国际政治原则,” 文史哲 2013.5: 5-13; and 儒学的经济学解释, (北京: 中国经济出版社, 2016).

[17] 葛兆光，“对‘天下’的想象：一个乌托邦想象背后的政治，思想，与学术,” 思想 29.3 (2015).

[18] Translator’s note:  Yao Zhongqiu, who frequently publishes funder the penname Qiu Feng 秋风, is a professor at the Advanced Institute of Confucian Studies at Shandong University 山东大学儒学高等研究院, a well-known New Confucian with somewhat liberal leanings.  Representative writings include:  儒家憲政論 (Hong Kong:  CUHK Press, 2016); and 美德 · 君子 · 风俗 (杭州：浙江大学出版社, 2012).

[19] Translator’s note:  Emperor Yu’s political counsellor.

[20] Translator’s note:  Yi was a culture hero in Chinese mythology who helped Shun and Yu control the Great Flood.

[21] Translator’s note:  Master of Music under Shun emperor.

[22] Translator’s note:  The Gonghe Regency refers to a period of interregnum in Zhou history, between 841 BCE, when King Li, a corrupt and decadent ruler, was removed from his position by popular demand, and 828, when his son, King Xuan, assumed the throne.  The “gonghe” title was chosen by the Han historian Sima Qian as a way of praising the “great harmony” achieved by the regency.  There is no obvious link to republicanism.

[23] In fact, before turning toward Confucianism, Yao’s principle interest was in studying and promoting Austrian thought, particularly that of Hayek, which led to the publication of his 普通法宪政主义 [Common-Law Constitutionalism].   His History of the Chinese Ruling System in an experiment in which Yao attempts to use historical methods to describe the constitutional character and appearance of the Confucian way of rule.

[24] Translator’s note:  See for example Ryan Patrick Hanley, "Enlightened Nation Building: The 'Science of the Legislator' in Adam Smith and Rousseau," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Apr., 2008): 219-234.

[25] 蒋庆，再论政治儒学 （上海：华东师范大学出版社，2011), p. 262.

[26] Translator’s note:  Chen Yun is professor of philosophy at East China Normal University in Shanghai.  A recent publication is 儒家思想与中国之道 (杭州：浙江大学出版社, 2016).

[27] Translator’s note:  各正性命 is from the Yijing; 物各付物 appears in writings from the Song Neoconfucians, and the meaning is similar.

[28] Translator’s note:  This passage is taken from Zhuangzi.

[29] Translator’s note:  Wang Hui is the best-known member of China’s New Left.  He is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and initially worked on Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936), China’s most famous modern writer, but Wang has published on a wide range of issues, including history, philosophy, geopolitics, and economics, as well as literature, much like critically engaged post-modern scholars in the West.  Wang’s field, broadly defined, is “discourse.”  English-language translations of some of his major works exist, but much remains to be translated, including his influential four-volume The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought 现代中国思想的兴起 (Beijing:  Shenghuo, Dushu, Xinzhi Sanlian Shudian:  2005).

[30] The question addressed by Wang’s book is “What is China?” which is the same core concern of those working on tianxia. 

[31] Wang’s is a work of intellectual history, yet is full of contemporary concerns.  In a review of Wang’s work, Huang Zongzhi 黄宗智 pointed out that: “In other words, ‘imperial’ China is really not that much like an empire, and the Chinese ‘nation-state’ is not that much like a nation-state.  This is the core of Wang Hui’s retelling of the history of China’s political regimes, as well as an important part of the conceptual space that he has sought out for China’s present and future in terms of an alternative political perspective.”  See 读书, 2008.8.

[32] 吴稼祥，公天下：多中心治理与双主体法权 (桂林：广西师范大学出版社, 2013).

[33] Lucien W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1992). 

[34] Translator’s note:  Zhang is a Professor of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.  He first came to prominence as Deng Xiaoping’s translator on his visit to the United States in the early 1980s.  Zhang’s writings are generally scorned by other Chinese intellectuals, but he is an effective and tireless cheerleader for the China model.

[35] 张维为，中国超越：一个“文明型国家”的光荣与梦想 (上海：上海人民出版社, 2014), 252-53.  Translator’s note:  Two volumes of Zhang’s trilogy, The China Horizon and The China Wave, are available in English. 

[36] 张维为，中国震撼：一个“文明型国家”的崛起 (上海：上海人民出版社, 2011), p. 64.

[37] 张维为，中国超越：一个“文明型国家”的光荣与梦想, p. 253.  Zhang basically copied his ideas about the civilizational state from Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (New York:  Penguin, 2009), and the major changes Zhang made were to convert an outside description and analysis of China into an internal narrative and proposal.

[38] See 张维为，中国超越：一个“文明型国家”的光荣与梦想, pp. 131, 148.  Zhang believes that the “three represents” and the ideas concerning scientific development proposed by the ruling party represent important organized aspects of this discourse system, but this discourse remains insufficient.  “We still need to renew the content and form of this discourse, building a great discourse system including popular discourse, academic discourse, and international discourse, a larger discursive system that will be in touch with the people, possess academic heft, and facilitate international communication.” 

[39] Bell is Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University and professor at Tsinghua University (Schwarzman College and Department of Philosophy). He was born in Canada, educated at McGill and Oxford, has taught in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

[40] Bell’s work was ranked number seven on the list of “the ten most important academic themes in the humanities and social sciences in 2016” jointly compiled by 文史哲 and by 中华读书报, because it contributed to understanding of China’s rise and the West’s decline in the period since China’s rise.  Two other themes listed—academic “indigenization 本土化” and “liberalism’s difficulties”—are also related to Bell’s theme, as well as to the topics under discussion in the present article.    

[41] The title of Bell’s work in English--The China Model:  Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy—has different connotations from the title of the Chinese translation--贤能政治：为什么尚贤制比选举民主制更适合中国?  The English-language title casts doubt on the virtues of democracy, while the Chinese-language title [Political Meritocracy:  Why Meritocracy is Better than Elections for China] championed the virtues of the China model.

[42] Translator’s note:  Jiang Shigong is a Professor in the Law Faculty of Peking University, and a leading voice among New Left thinkers who defend statism.  Liang discusses later on in his essay Jiang’s important defense of Xi Jinping Thought, published in January 2018.  A more recent article, in which Jiang seems to defend the coming Chinese “empire,” is available in translation here:  https://www.readingthechinadream.com/jiang-shigong-empire-and-world-order.html . 

[43] Some specialists in international law argue that the modern concept of sovereignty cannot adequately describe the existing practice of international relations, and one example they cite is China’s exercise of sovereignty in the case of Hong Kong.  According to this viewpoint, the relationship between Hong Kong as a part of China and China’s central government is similar to the power relationship that existed in the traditional tribute system.  Wang Hui makes this argument in his Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, as does Martin Jacques.

[44] Translator’s note:  In his From the Soil, Fei Xiaotong contrasts the Western, individualistic mode of social life in which all people are viewed as equals, with the more group-centered social life characteristic of the Chinese, in which groups functioned as concentric circles, facilitating and shaping social interactions.  Jiang Shigong has adapted this concept to international relations.  

[45] Chapter 5 of Jiang’s book focuses on the tianxia mentality and strategic thought of Mao Zedong and of the Communist Party under his leadership.  Even if tianxia is not in accord with Marxism, and although, with the exception of the past few decades, the CCP’s efforts to build the party and the country have consistently been anti-tradition, Jiang nonetheless underscores the CCP’s inheritance of China’s tradition, a point shared by all tianxia theorists discussed here.  Some argue that “the ruling party in China is in essence a continuation of the Confucian ruling body from Chinese tradition, and not a Western political party the represents interest groups in competition with others,” see Zhang Weiwei, The China Shock.  Another asserted that Western political parties are “representative parties,” while the Chinese Communist Party is a “leading party,” whose responsibility is to “inform the body politic where China has come from, where it is at present, and where it is going in the future,” and hence to “lead us there.”  See 曹锦清, “百年复兴：中国共产党的时代叙事与历史使命,” in 玛雅， 道路自信：中国为什么能 (Beijing: 2014).

[46] Translator’s note:  Gan Yang is Professor and Dean at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, and holds concurrent positions at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Chongqing University in Chongqing.  His ideology has changed over the years, but at present, he is most frequently identified as a member of the New Left.

[47] In Gan Yang’s own words, his choice to use the concept of “unifying the three traditions” from the classical Chinese intellectual tradition was in order to “discuss a number of questions concerning the agency of Chinese civilization in the era of globalization.”At this point I should mention Gan Yang’s fellow traveler 同道 and collaborator Liu Xiaofeng 刘小枫 (b. 1956).  Even if Liu has not been mentioned in the present text as an example of a tianxia theorist, his intellectual concerns have nonetheless developed around the core themes of these theories.  Moreover, as a productive scholar and an organizer of many academic projects, he also plays a role as someone who guides the direction of academic thought.  At first glance, one might think that the studies of Western antiquity into which he has poured so much effort are very far from the concerns of contemporary China, but in fact, his work has considerable contemporary importance.  In his “editor’s remarks” found in a collection of translations entitled From Universal History to Historicism 从普遍历史到历史主义 (Beijing, 2017), he explains his editorial choices:  “In the current world political situation, China’s strategic position is continually ascending, and how to understand world history from the perspective of Chinese civilization is become a pressing theoretical issue.” Elsewhere in the same volume, Liu makes the same point even more clearly:  “Are China’s political and civilizational positions in the world rising in the wake of China’s rise? The answer is obvious.  For this reason, Chinese intellectuals must engage in intellectual and cultural efforts, efforts that may well begin with “understanding the world.”  “During a prosperous age, the reigning dynasty needs all the more to understand world affairs, and what is important about world affairs are not petty international matters, but instead understanding the world itself.”  Translation has the same significance:  “In our efforts to establish China’s rightful place 立足华夏大地, translating the various histories of the world as written and rewritten in the United States and Europe is absolutely not a simple matter of understanding the customs of various countries, but is rather to understand how the present world has come to be.  The point is to look at ourselves squarely, in a sort of mise en abyme, at a point when Chinese civilization has entered yet another new age.  The historical mission of protecting of our nation, our race and our teachings must and can only be accomplished through a world narrative.”  Here, Liu insists that the purpose of knowledge is political.  Elsewhere, in a general preface to a collection on political philosophy, 政治哲学文库, of which Liu and Gan Yang were joint editors, the two defined political philosophy as “knowledge that transcends disciplines,” because:  “Political philosophy is a concentrated expression of  the self-knowledge and self-reflection of a political community, and moreover, the rise of political philosophy generally occurs when there are great debates within a political community, debates which often relate to basic beliefs and values held by the political community, basic lifestyle questions, and basic institutional justifications.  At this point, these become the common concern of all humanistic disciplines.”  See Gan Yang and Liu Xiaofeng, eds., 政治哲学文库, preface to the collection.  Liu’s most recent work on political philosophy, 以美为鉴：注意美国立国原则的是非未定之争 (Beijing, 2017), expresses doubts about the superiority of the American political system through an examination of the debates between the Straussian and Cambridge schools of intellectual history in England and the United States.  I might add in passing that familiarity with Schmidt and Strauss in the Chinese thought world is largely the work of the efforts of Gan and Liu, but, like Gan and Liu themselves, Strauss and Schmidt are figures of controversy within the Chinese world of discourse.  For a criticism of Jiang Shigong’s legal views of Schmitt, see 陈冠中, 中国天朝注意与香港 (Hong Kong, 2012).  For an analysis and criticism of the “Schmitt-Strauss school”in China, see 王炜, “从布鲁姆对罗尔斯的误解看施特劳斯学派政治哲学及其中国变体,” in 天府新论, 2017.6. 

[48] The very title of a book on the subject makes this abundantly clear; see 曾亦，郭晓冬，eds.，何为普世？谁之价值？ [What is Universal?  Whose Values?] (Shanghai, 2014).  I will have much to say about this book below.

[49] 白永瑞, “中华帝国论在东亚的意义－－探索批评性的中国研究,” 开放时代 2014.1, available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/72241-6.html .

[50] Translator’s note:  Tianxia-ism 天下主义 is a term generally used by those who are critical of the ideas Liang is exploring in this text.  By adding “ism” they “denaturalize” the concept and underscore its ideological dimensions.

[51] Paek concludes that “In the context of China’s rise, which is a global problem, the discourse of empire contains an expectation, which is that ‘China as empire’ will become an empire that is not only good for China, but also a ‘good empire’ that will be good for the entire world.  But for this ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ to come to fruition, it will not be enough to simply understand the history and current reality of China’s ‘imperial nature.’”

[52] Translator’s note:  Chan is an author, journalist, activist and environmentalist, best known in the West for his 2009 dystopian novel The Fat Years.  Although born in China, he has often resided in the Chinese diaspora (Hong Kong, Taiwan), and this distance allows him a uniquely critical voice.

[53] Translator’s note:  Ge Zhaoguang is a Professor in the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and the Department of History at Fudan University in Shanghai.  He is a scholar of immense erudition whose principle focus during his career has been on traditional Chinese intellectual history.  Samples of his work available in English translation include books such as What is China?  Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History (Harvard, 2018) and An Intellectual History of China (Brill, 2014), as well as a spate of articles in journals such as Chinese Studies in History and Frontiers of History in China.

[54] 思想, 29.9.

[55] Translator’s note:  An English translation of Ge’s article is available here: https://www.readingthechinadream.com/ge-zhaoguang-if-horses-had-wings.html.

[56] Translator’s note:  By adding “new” and “ism” to tianxia, Xu Jilin surely aims to highlight the contemporary reconstruction of the tianxia idea, the notion that any return to tradition is a reinvention of tradition.

[57] Translator’s note:  Xu is Professor of History at East China Normal University in Shanghai, specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese intellectual history and life.  A sample of his recent essays in English translation are available in Xu Jilin (David Ownby, trans.), Rethinking China’s Rise (Oxford, 2018).

[58] Beijing:  Shehue Kexue Wenxian 2011.  On the basis of its content, this book should be included among the critical reactions to tianxia, but strangely enough, these critical reactions were completely absorbed into the proposals Xu labels “new tianxia-ism.” This posture displeased Ge Zhaoguang, who offers his criticisms of Xu in his “对‘天下’的想象：一个乌托邦想象背后的政治，思想和学术,” 思想 29.

[59] Issues 10 and 11 of the same journal, also edited by Xu, bore the titles “What Kind of Civilization?  Rethinking China’s Rise 何种文明？中国崛起的再思考,” and “Individual, State, and Tianxia Identities in Multidimensional Perspectives 多维视野中的个人，国家与天下认同,” and were clearly focused on the same issues.

[60] Among the other essays appearing in this special issue, I would like to single out Liu Qing’s 刘擎 “In Pursuit of a Collaboratively Constructed Universalism:  From the Tianxia Ideal to a New Internationalism 寻求共建的普遍性－－从天下理想到新世界主义.  Liu does not deny the virtues attributed to the traditional ‘tianxia’ concept by tianxia theorists, such as openness and flexibility, but instead focuses on the modern transformation of the traditional tianxia viewpoint, by which he means the search for a “collaboratively constructed world” in the course of “cultural encounters.”  In Liu’s argument, cultural agency is not a fixed idea, but rather a changing, living concept in which lines between inner and outer are constantly being explored.  The object of the critique of Liu’s “new internationalism” is clear.

[61] Translator’s note:  A translation of Xu’s essay is available on our site at:  https://www.readingthechinadream.com/xu-jilin-the-new-tianxia.html.

[62] Shanghai:  Shanghai renmin, 2016.

[63] Translator’s note:  Qian’s text is 钱永祥, “主体如何面对他者：普遍主义的三种类型,” in Qian Yongxiang, 普遍与特殊的辩证：政治思想的发掘, (Taibei, 2012).

[64] 许纪霖, “中国如何以文明大国出现于世界?” in 家国天下。Translator’s note:  See also Xu Jilin, “What Kind of Civilization?  China at a Crossroads,” and “Universal Civilization, or Chinese Values?  A Critique of Historicist Thought since 2000,” in Xu, Rethinking China’s Rise pp. 1-19 and 61-94.

[65] Translator’s note:  This is a reference to a 2012 conference devoted to this question, which resulted in a number of publications.  An abstract of the conference proceedings is available here:  http://www.opentimes.cn/Abstract/1858.html .  Xu Zhangrun’s 许章润 response to Yao’s question is available in English translation here:  https://www.readingthechinadream.com/xu-zhangrun-chinas-moment.html .

[66] Translator’s note:  the creator of the universe in Chinese mythology.

[67] Translator’s note:  available here, but behind a paywall:  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-06-22/american-tianxia .

[68] Translator’s note:  Shi Zhan is a Professor in the Department of Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs Management at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.

[69] Nanning:  Guangxi Shifan Daxue, 2018.

[70] Translator’s note:  Wu Jiaxing is a writer and public intellectual who was imprisoned for three years because of his implication in the student protests at Tiananmen in 1989.  He later spent three years (2000-2003) as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Fairbank Center.

[71] Nanning:  Guangxi Shifan Daxue, 2013.

[72] Translator’s note:  Huang Zongxi was an important late-Ming Confucian philosopher and historian, known particularly for his attacks on autocracy and promotion of ideas of local automony.

[73] Translator’s note:  The taijitu is the basic representation of yin and yang, the two opposing forces whose harmonious and cyclical interaction defines the basic dynamics of the universe in Chinese cosmology.

[74] Translator’s note:  Wang Mingming is a Chinese anthropologist, trained in archaeology and ethnological history at Xiamen University. He later did his Ph.D. in social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London In 1994, he returned to China to teach in Peking University and currently teaches in the Ethnography Department of the Central Minorities University.

[75] See Wang Mingming, 超社会体系：文明与中国, Beijing:  Sanlian, 2015.

[76] Another influential recent work on the topic civilization in the Chinese academic world is 刘禾 Liu He, ed., 世界秩序与文明等级：全球史研究的新路径, (Beijing, 2016).

[77] Translator’s note:  These are references to the well-known television series “River Elegy 河殇,” which aired on CCTV in 1988. 

[78] Aired in 2006, “The Rise of Great Powers” is a representative example of television series produced by CCTV on this theme.

[79] Discussions of the China model began with economics before spreading to the realms of politics, society and culture.  Among the many and varied treatments of the theme, see Yao Yang 姚洋, 中国道路的世界意义, (Beijing, 2011); Huang Yasheng 黄亚生, “中国模式”到底有多独特? (Beijing, 2011); Ding Xueliang 丁学良辩论”中国模式,” (Beijing, 2011); Ma Ya 玛雅，道路自信：中国为什么能, (Beijing, 2013).

[80] See Kang Xiaoguang 康晓光, 当代大陆传统文化复兴现象研究, (2011) available online at http://www.chinakongzi.org/rjwh/guoxue/lzxd/201112/t20111227_6839178.htm  .

[81] The 2011 Sixth Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Seventeenth Party Congress, where cultural development was a main theme, was an important moment in this process.  The meeting confirmed the important position and function of culture in the overall competition for national strength, and noted that “increasing the country’s cultural soft power and the international influence of Chinese culture” was a pressing need at the time. 

[82] Cao Jinqing 曹锦清, “百年复兴：中国共产党的时代叙事与历史使命,” available in English translation here:  https://www.readingthechinadream.com/cao-jinqing-a-centennial-revivial.html .

[83] Translator’s note:  the quote is from the Confucian Analects, see https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/23420/Analects_of_Confucius_%28Eno-2015%29-updated.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y , p. 90.

[84] See Zeng Yi 曾亦 and Guo Xiaodong 郭晓冬, eds., 何谓普世？谁之价值？当代儒家论普世价值, especially Chapter Five on “夷夏之辨与民族，国家问题.” Not all New Confucians hold such views, nor are such views held only by New Confucians; Zhao Tingyang also sees universality and pluralism as the world’s most common ideology.

[85] See Qi Yihu 齐义虎, “畿服之制与天下格局,” 天府新论, 2016: 4.

[86] From Kang Xiaoguang, see “专访康晓光：中国必须走向’儒家宪政,’” available online at https://www.rujiazg.com/article/7362 .

[87] In fact, tianxia theorists often link their ideas to the development of One Belt-One Road.  See for example Yao Zhongqiu 姚中秋, “从天下秩序角度看一带一路战略,” available online at https://www.rujiazg.com/article/8281 ; Bao Jianyun 保健云, “论公共天下主义：概念体系与理论框架,” available online at http://www.360doc.com/content/18/0128/15/31570836_725787681.shtml .  Such arguments have not gone unnoticed among China’s neighbors, some of whom are anxious about the “return of tianxia,” see for example the opinion of Lee Kwan Yew in his 李光辉论中国与世界.

[88] Translator’s note:  Gu was a famous Ming dynasty scholar and Ming loyalist.

[89] See the volume 习近平用典 (Xi Jinping’s Use of the Classics), (Beijing, 2015).  The volume is divided into 13 chapters:  Respect the People 敬民, Governing 为政, Establishing Virtue 立德, Cultivation 修身, Honest Behavior 笃行, Diligent Study 勤学, Appointing the Worthy 任贤, All-Under-Heaven 天下, Clean Government 廉政, Belief and Credibility 信念, Innovation 创新, Rule of Law 法治, and  Dialectics 辩证.  297 of Xi’s references are sorted into these chapters. 

[90] According to Baidu, the idea of the China Dream was first mentioned by Xi Jinping on November 29, 2012, when he visited an exhibition on “The Road to Revival” at the National Museum.  He subsequently gave an official explanation of it on March 17 of the following year at the closing ceremony of a meeting of the 12th National People’s Conference.  Its concrete contents were originally linked to the “two centuries” goal announced at the 15th National Party Congress, meaning that by 2021, or one hundred years after the founding of the CCP, China will have constructed a relatively prosperous society for all of its citizens, and by 2049, one hundred years after the founding of the PRC, it will have built a strong, democratic, civilized and harmonious modern socialist country.  Xi further noted that realization of the China Dream would require “taking China’s path, promoting the Chinese spirit.” 

[91] This slogan was first put forward by Jiang Zemin in 1992 at a speech at Harvard University. 

[92] See Cao Jinqing, op.cit.

[93] Wang Hui 汪晖, 现代中国思想的兴起, vol. 1, p. 783.

[94] Chen Yun 陈赟, 天下或天地之间：中国思想的古典视域 (Shanghai, 2007), p. 107. Emphasis added by Liang.

[95] Zhao Tingyang, 天下体系, p. 9.

[96] From the Report to the 19th Party Congress.

[97] Translator’s note:  A complete translation of Jiang’s text is available here:  https://www.readingthechinadream.com/jiang-shigong-philosophy-and-history.html , and passages subsequently cited by Liang are taken from this translation.

[98] Liang notes that Steve Bannon criticized US media for paying so little attention to Xi’s report, which revealed “China’s plans to establish its worldwide hegemony.” 

[99] In addition to the scholars already cited who have participated in this exercise, there are also younger scholars, such as the authors of 大道之行：中国共产党与中国社会主义 (The Working of the Great Way:  The Chinese Communist Party and Chinese Socialism), five young scholars who have returned to China after studying abroad.  The following passage from the volume illustrates their thinking:  “The style of study employed by the CCP, its political practice and mechanism, are both the embodiment of essence of a Marxist political party, and even more the continuation and development of China’s civilizational tradition combining politics and education, it is a self-transformation and rebirth of the most progressive corps of Chinese civilization, represented by the traditional Confucian literati, in the territory of modernity.  Building the Party on this foundation is both the construction of a political agency serving as the core leadership ship in China’s revolution and construction, as well as the construction of a civilizational agency that inherits Chinese moral orthodoxy.  The practice of revolution and nation-building under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is both the reconstruction of China’s political community as well as the reconstruction of Chinese civilization.”  Other scholars in this group include: Wang Shaoguang 王绍光 and Pan Wei 潘维, who wrote a preface for the book just cited, and both of whom have essays in Ma Ya’s volume, 道路自信：中国为什么能, (Beijing, 2013); and Han Yuhai 韩毓海, 天下：抱纳四夷的中国 (Beijing, 2011).  For discussions of the links between Confucianism and socialism, see the 2016.1 issue of 开放时代, which is devoted completely to the issue.  On links between historical Confucianism and Marxism, see Ren Jiantao 任剑涛,   当经成为经典：现代儒学的型变, (Beijing, 2018).     

[100] In Jiang Shigong’s essay on the “New Xi Jinping Era,” he points out, on the subject of political sensitivity, that, after the introduction of the slogan concerning the great revival of the Chinese nation, a division among China’s Liberals produced the “big country group 大国派,” “which has hastened to embrace the rise of the nation as a political subject,” arguing “that only by adopting a liberal democratic constitution can we truly carry out the great revival of the Chinese nation.”  At the same time, “a group of cultural conservatives has…developed into a kind of ‘revive antiquity group’ 复古派 and advocates the ‘Confucianization of the Party.’” In Jiang’s view, such opinions “present a challenge to the political authority of the CCP’s leadership of the country and to the political system.” 

[101] This is particularly notable among the New Confucians, who see the ruling party’s embrace of culture as a kind of “re-sinicization.”  See Zeng Yi 曾亦 and Guo Xiaodong 郭晓冬, eds., 何谓普世？谁之价值？当代儒家论普世价值, op. cit.

[102] The most lively mainland journals in this context are 文化纵横，开放时代，文史哲，天府新论，and 学习与探索.

[103] Zheng is professor and director of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.

[104] Ci Jiwei, Tianxia as Hegemony, unpublished manuscript.

[105] The report of the 18th Party Congress proposed the construction of the “three self-confidences” necessary to the building of socialism with Chinese characteristics.  These confidences were in China’s “path,” “theory,” and “system.”  The report of the 19th Party added “cultural self-confidence” to these.

[106] Zheng Yongnian, 中国的文明复兴, op.cit., p. 198.

[107] Zhao Tingyang distinguishes “the significance of knowledge from a political perspective” from “the significance of knowledge from a theoretical perspective,” and argues that the former refers to the relationship between “knowledge and power” while the latter refers the relationship between “knowledge and responsibility.”  He further emphasizes that “Knowledge cannot be understood as a purely epistemological activity, and truth is not the highest standard of criticism.  Truth must be good and responsible.” Zhao, 中国的文明复兴, op.cit., p. 4. 

[108] On this point, Ci offers different valuations of two important tianxia texts:  Gan Chunsong’s 干春松 重回王道：儒家与世界秩序, and Zhao Tingyang’s 天下的当代性：世界秩序的实践和想象.  Ci feels that Gan’s work does not meet the threshold of plausibility, and thus will have no power of persuasion outside of Gan’s own circle.  Zhao’s work is different, being based on a number of reasonable philosophical principles.  At the same time, his proposal to “view the world from the world’s perspective” also strains credibility.